Aircraft

On the first day of the NBAA convention, Cessna launched a new light midsize airplane, the Citation Latitude, which will sell for around $15 million. The airplane will feature an all new all-metal stand-up cabin fuselage, a wing nearly identical to the Citation Sovereign midsize jet and the Garmin G5000 integrated avionics suite. Cessna announced […]

At the NBAA convention in Las Vegas, Embraer named international film star and martial arts expert Jackie Chan its official brand ambassador. Over the years, the 57-year-old Chan has made more than 100 movies and has estabished himself as a big box office draw around the globe with his clever, funny and frenetic acting, which […]

With certification of the G280 imminent, Pres Henne, Senior Vice President, Programs, Engineering and Test at Gulfstream, announced that extensive flight-testing has shown better than expected performance. At Mach 0.80 with four passengers, the airplane has shown a range of 3,600 nm, 200 nm better than the expected range when the program was first announced […]

A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B completed its first shipboard vertical landing on Tuesday, touching down on the deck of the USS Wasp in the Atlantic during preliminary phases of ship suitability testing. The Joint Strike Fighter will continue shipboard testing during the next two weeks, striving to complete a planned 67 landings on the Wasp […]

While in some people’s minds it might stretch the definition of a “hybrid,” Eurocopter’s electric/turboshaft AS350 helicopter a few days ago successfully completed a flight with an electric backup motor. In this case, the motor doesn’t power the main blades for normal flight but assists during autorotation, which, according to Eurocopter, took much of the […]

The Nextant 400XT has received FAA certification, Nextant Aerospace announced on Wednesday, marking the final step in the approval process for one of the most extensively refurbished business jets on the market. The Nextant 400XT is a remanufactured Beechjet 400A upgraded with Williams FJ44-3AP turbofan engines and Rockwell Collins Pro Line 21 avionics. The jet […]

(October 2011) While I was training for my Sport Pilot certificate, there were several times after my instructor and I returned from a late-afternoon flight lesson when a sport pilot grad and another CFI would be next in line to take the Remos G-3 out for a lesson. A lesson that would clearly extend beyond […]

__It’s not often that an amateur aeronautical tinkerer will hit upon a business idea so perfectly suited for the times that it advances, almost overnight, to become a runaway success story. Such was the case in 1971, when a young engineer from Oregon named Richard VanGrunsven tried, in his own words, to “build a better […]

Piper Aircraft will be recruiting in Wichita next week as the company looks to fill a variety of positions at Piper headquarters in Vero Beach, Florida. The recruitment effort comes after the company recently announced a surge in billings and deliveries during the first half of 2011. During those six months, Piper put more than […]

On Monday at its Wichita headquarters, Cessna unveiled its latest bizjet. It was, as many predicted it would be, a replacement for the slot vacated when the company stopped production of its entry-level CJ, the ** CJ1+**. The new airplane is dubbed the M2. Despite the capital “M,” it is not based on the Mustang […]