Aircraft

Cessna took the first production version of its latest Citation, the M2, to the skies from the company’s facility in Independence, Kansas, where the twinjet will be produced alongside the Citation Mustang and Cessna’s single-engine products. Production test pilots Terry Martindale and Corey Eckhart flew the M2 up to 17,500 feet, testing the jet for […]

The market for aircraft refurbishment is on pace to expand to $4.3 billion per year over the next five years, according to a report by MarketsandMarkets.com. That’s up from $3.04 billion spent in 2012. The report cites needs for fleet expansion among airlines and cargo carriers, but also the business aviation sector. Undoubtedly, the big […]

de Havilland Mosquito photos by Scott Slocum| When I first came across Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft as a new associate editor at Flying magazine in the mid-1990s, I was already a longtime aviation-history enthusiast — an incurable condition I inherited from my father. Jane’s, as I hope you know, is the record of aircraft […]

Beechcraft celebrated this week as the production version of the new AT-6 Texan II light attack airplane completed its first flight in Wichita. “It flies beautifully,” Lionel Alford, one of the test pilots of the inaugural flight, said after the successful mission. “This achievement highlights the tremendous effort of the entire Beechcraft team involved in […]

Van’s builders have been practically begging BRS Aerospace to offer its whole-airframe emergency recovery parachutes for the lineup of popular homebuilts – and now BRS has delivered by making the rocket-fired chutes available for the Van’s RV-7 and RV-9. It took some creative engineering to add a parachute to the RV models, but the company […]

Boeing’s run of dismal press relating to the 787 Dreamliner continued this week with a report out of Japan that the fire suppression system on the advanced jet could improperly discharge fire suppressant to the wrong engine in the event of a fire. Japan’s All Nippon Airways said it discovered a wiring fault that would […]

Cessna has rolled out the first production Citation M2, the successor to the entry-level Citation CJ1+, designed expressly to be the step-up model for owner-pilots of the Mustang. Like the Mustang, M2 has Garmin avionics, but in this case they are not G1000 but the cutting-edge G3000, designed for light jets. The new 400-knot jet […]

Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX completed an impressive precision flight on Tuesday with the Falcon 9 rocket, also called the Grasshopper. In what SpaceX referred to as a divert test, the rocket climbed to an altitude of about 800 feet, then moved about 300 feet laterally before making a picture perfect landing at the center of its […]

As a result of multiple cases of cylinder head cracks and cylinder head-to-barrel separations related to cylinder assemblies supplied by Engine Components International (ECi) in Continental engines, the FAA has proposed an airworthiness directive that could cost aircraft owners big money. The affected engines include Continental’s IO-520, TSIO-520, IO-550 and IOF-550 among others — engines […]

On Saturday August 24 the National Transportation Safety Board will hold a seminar on “lessons learned” from accidents involving experimental amateur-built (E-AB) aircraft. Though some 33,000 E-ABs constitute a bit less than 10 percent of the U.S. GA fleet, the category accounts for 15 percent of accidents and more than 20 percent of fatal accidents, […]