Aircraft

A group named Directional Aviation Capital has purchased Flexjet, the fractional ownership business formerly operated as a division of Bombardier. There is no doubt that the new owners have great faith in the business. As part of the ownership change, the newly formed Flexjet, LLC signed a deal with Bombardier that could add up to […]

Pipistrel has introduced a new LSA, which offers the capability of quickly turning the airplane from a motorglider into a cross-country cruiser. The Sinus Flex is a standard Sinus model, which was designed with a 49-foot 1.5-inch wingspan. But the outermost parts of the Flex version’s wings are removable and can be substituted for shorter […]

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 […]