Aircraft

Cessna Aircraft on Saturday launched the inaugural “Cessna Discover Flying Challenge” during an open house in Independence, Kansas. The event kicked off a five-week flying tour for a group of selectively chosen ** Cessna Skycatcher** pilots that will include visits to various fly-ins, airshows and other aviation gatherings, all done in the name of raising […]

Eurocopter is making a grand U.S. tour with its X3 hybrid developmental heloplane, which features a pair of conventional looking turboprops in addition to a conventional looking rotar. The craft, which Eurocopter developed in just three years’ time, is nearly 100 knots faster than the fleetest comparably sized conventional helicopters. The X3 has achieved better […]

A recent patent awarded to Airbus by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicates engineers at the industry giant have quite a unique design up their sleeves – a double fuselage airliner, to be exact. Design drawings associated with the patent, filed in 2008, show the fuselages connected by way of two forward-swept wings, with […]

Gamera II, a giant human-powered helicopter developed by students at the University of Maryland’s Clark School, has been vying this week for both new world records and the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize. On Thursday, the team made an unofficial 40-second human powered flight, shattering the group’s previous 11.4-second record set with a flight of the Gamera […]

As investigators continue to probe the fatal 2011 crash of a Gulfstream G650 test aircraft, the NTSB recently voiced some harsh words regarding Gulfstream’s handling of the investigation. In a letter dated April 4, 2012, NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman outlined a number of offenses committed by the bizjet giant, including information withholding, noncompliance with NTSB […]

The upcoming integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the National Airspace System within the next few years has local, county, state and federal agencies pining for drones, this according to a story in the Christian Science Monitor. The story points to the public’s conflicted view of drone operations — they like them for hunting […]

The Pilatus PC-12 that crashed near Lakeland earlier this month had changed course to avoid bad weather directly before the crash, according to a preliminary report released by the NTSB this week. The NTSB cited ATC transmissions showing a controller warning the 45-year-old Pilatus PC-12 pilot of a sizeable area of precipitation northwest of Lakeland […]

Hawker Beechcraft’s path to solvency will likely include a major decrease in bizjet production, according to a recent report by the Wichita Eagle. As part of its recent bankruptcy filing, Hawker Beechcraft submitted a “Project Flight” plan outlining three potential options for moving forward, all of which preserve the company’s piston, King Air and military […]

After lying on the bottom of the Baltic Sea for more than half a century, the wreckage of a rare Junkers Ju 88 is being brought to the surface by a group of German military divers. The wreckage, located just off the coast of the German island of Rugen, was first found in the 1990s […]

E-Volo, the company that performed the first flight of an all-electric, 16-propeller multicopter last October, is pressing forward with the development of commercial versions of the craft and giving the public a glimpse into just what those variants might look like. Over the next two years, the company says it hopes to develop a regulation […]