Aircraft

All-new design airplanes from startup companies are often called “paper airplanes” because the company has no track record of producing any kind of airplane. So when you design a paper airplane, you should shoot for the moon, and Stratos, a new would-be jet maker in Bend, Oregon, has with its Model 714 personal jet. For […]

Last year when Bend, Oregon, company Columbia Aircraft exhausted its last gasp efforts at getting enough cash to stay in business and declared bankruptcy, there was immediate speculation that Cessna would buy the company’s assets at auction. As it turned out, Cessna had been looking at that possibility for some time already. And by the […]

Since its certification back in 1994, the hallmark of the remarkably successful Pilatus PC-12 turboprop single has been its tremendous flexibility and utility — with a cabin full of passengers and cargo, it can go from a cozy dirt strip to the city lights a thousand miles distant, flying far above the terrain and much […]

It’s official. With the introduction of the G3 version, the seminal Cirrus SR20 piston single is all grown up. I hadn’t fully realized that until recently, when I had the lucky chance to fly a pair of SR20s, one really old one (well, as old as they get) and one brand spanking new one, in […]

Could an airplane hit the bull’s-eye more squarely in today’s environment than the TBM 850? I don’t see how. The turboprop single burns about half again as much fuel as a typical piston twin, but it flies at least 100 knots faster on that fuel. And its range easily stretches out over 1,200 nm even […]

On the evening before announcing he is leaving Eclipse, Vern Raburn took another stage at EAA AirVenture with a decidedly more upbeat message. He serves on the advisory board of Icon Aircraft, a Los Angeles company that hopes to produce its A5 light sport amphibian. The Icon A5 is a two-seat, folding-wing, trailer-capable amphibian with […]

SMA (Societe de Motorisations Aeronautiques) has a solution to the effect of higher fuel prices if you operate a Cessna 182. Its answer? The SMA SR 305-230-1 diesel engine, designed and developed from scratch as an aircraft engine. The engine, STCed for most Cessna 182Qs and 182Rs, is a horizontally opposed, four-cylinder, turbocharged, air/oil-cooled, diesel […]

**** It’s been almost 10 years since Austrian manufacturer Diamond Aircraft launched its all-composite four-seater, the DA40 Diamond Star, as a follow-on to its successful but payload-limited Katana two-seat trainer. I went to the Diamond factory in Austria back then to fly and photograph the Diamond Star, though I have to admit that based on […]

If you had listened to critics sounding the death knell of the turboprop some years back, you might have thought that the Cessna Caravan would be a museum exhibit by now. Competing, as it seemed to be, against every imaginable kind of airplane-jets, turboprop twins, pressurized singles, even piston singles-how could Cessna’s big nonpressurized turboprop […]

Swiss airframer Pilatus announced it has received FAA and European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) approval for its Next Generation Pilatus PC-12, to be designated PC-12 NG. The central element to the new version of the popular turboprop single is the Primus Apex avionics suite, and a new cockpit design from BMW Group DesignworksUSA. The Pilatus […]