Aviation News

In sport aerobatics, precision is everything and mistakes are easily made. Last week, 60 of the top aerobatic pilots in the world gathered in Châteauroux, France, to battle it out, dancing in the sky with their high performance airplanes in the FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale or World Air Sports Federation) World Aerobatic Championships. With margins […]

The service was at a Presbyterian church in a small town east of Cincinnati — about a 30-minute flight in the Cessna 180. I had planned to fly there and commandeer the airport’s retired police car, but my airplane wouldn’t start. When I jumped in and “cranked,” it wouldn’t fire — odd, because it was […]

The XTI TriFan 600, a conceptual three-rotor vertical takeoff and landing airplane now in the early developmental stage, would be easy to dismiss as just another fantasy of well-intentioned aviation dreamers. Until you realize who those dreamers are. The new XTI Aircraft based in Denver is headed by a veteran leadership team that includes Jeff […]

The most recent general aviation safety report from AOPA’s Air Safety Institute shows an “unprecedented” decrease in non-commercial airplane accidents, dropping below 1,000 annually for the first time. It’s tempting to correlate the drop in GA fixed-wing accidents with a reduction in overall flight hours, but FAA estimates show that the safety improvement notched noteworthy […]

Plan your flights on your desktop or laptop computer, automatically sync them to ForeFlight Mobile on your tablet and then use ForeFlight Connect to sync directly with your avionics in the cockpit. That’s the vision ForeFlight’s creators have for their flight planning subscription service with new web browser capability now in beta testing. Whether they […]

The violent monsoonal weather that hit the Chandler Municipal Airport earlier this month caused much damage to airplanes and structures. So much so that the cost of the damage is expected to reach well beyond $1 million. Local CBS 5 affiliate KPHO reported that more than 40 airplanes were damaged and destroyed as they were […]

NASA’s Search and Rescue Mission Office this week conducted the third and final Cessna 172 Skyhawk crash test at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in its quest to improve the post-crash effectiveness of Emergency Locator Transmitters in severe but survivable crashes. Video clips from several angles show a Skyhawk being dropped from […]

Accident investigators are trying to determine why a New York-area air traffic controller directed the pilot of a Beech Bonanza who died in the crash of his airplane earlier this month toward a nonexistent airport in the middle of an industrial area, possibly giving the man false hope as he desperately searched for a suitable […]

It was a tough weekend for airshows in Europe, ending with multiple fatalities of not only airshow pilots but also unsuspecting bystanders. At the Shoreham Airport in southeastern England, a Hawker Hunter, a vintage warbird jet developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, crashed in a massive fireball into the busy A27 freeway, killing […]

Flytenow, the Uber-style ride sharing service for airplanes, will get its day in court next month when a federal judge hears its case against the FAA, which effectively shut down the site last summer, saying it runs afoul of private pilot cost-sharing rules that prohibit commercial air operations. Flytenow strongly disagrees that its proposed service […]