Aircraft

Cirrus chairman and co-founder Dale Klapmeier this week sought to put an end to talk of a possible counter bid to a buyout deal from a Chinese aviation company. “There is no counter offer,” Klapmeier said at Sun ‘n Fun on Wednesday when asked about the news that a group of private U.S. investors led […]

(March 2010) — The girlfriend of a student pilot, eager to see how his flying skills were coming along — he had recently soloed — arranged to accompany him and his instructor on a flight. They took off in a 172 on a beautiful June evening. She was sitting behind her boyfriend, who was in […]

Cessna has a mockup of its upgraded Corvalis TTx on display at the Sun ‘n Fun Fly-In in Lakeland, Florida, this week. Equipped with Garmin‘s new G2000 avionics suite, the Corvalis TTx, which will be available for delivery in 2012, has received a full interior and exterior face lift. (Click here for a recent article […]

Hawker Beechcraft unveiled its latest 200-series King Air at Sun ‘n Fun this week, featuring the new King Air 250 at its static display. The long-running PT6-powered King Air franchise spans the entry-level C90GTx to the type-rating required 350i, but the 200-series with its roomy cabin, decent speed and fabulous payload has always been a […]

Piper today announced Ready, Set Fly, a sales incentive program to help buyers of new Piper Archer LX singles get from zero time to private pilot at no additional cost. The Archer LX is a 180 hp, 128-knot fixed-gear single that sells for just over $300,000 equipped with the Garmin G500 PFD/MFD. Piper will offer […]

The CJ1+ program has “run its course,” said Robert Stangarone, vice president of communications at Cessna Aircraft Company. Having delivered three airplanes of this model in 2010 and with only two scheduled deliveries for this year, the company cites decreased customer demand as the reason for closing down its CJ1+ production line. First introduced in […]

The team behind Sikorsky’s X2 technology demonstrator has won the 2010 Robert J. Collier Trophy, six months after the unique twin-coaxial rotorcraft set an unofficial speed record for a helicopter of 250 knots. “Sikorsky has a long and storied history of innovation, starting with the invention of the world’s first practical helicopter and continuing today […]

The FAA has issued an airworthiness directive reducing the Eclipse EA500‘s maximum ceiling to 30,000 feet after several reported instances of engine surging. This is the second time the FAA has sought to lower the Eclipse 500’s ceiling because of problems with the airplane’s Pratt & Whitney Canada PW610F-A engines. A 2008 AD reduced the […]

(February 2011) — It has been seldom in the history of aviation that a single technology has revolutionized the way we fly by addressing multiple problems facing the industry and solving them all. The most important such event was the widescale adoption of the turbine engine in the 1940s. Turbines, as you know, remedied (and […]

HondaJet has indefinitely postponed a planned media tour of the company’s Greensboro, North Carolina, headquarters after the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11. In a statement last Friday to invited media, the company wrote, “As you have surely heard by now, the country of Japan has just suffered an […]