Aviation News

With his harebrained landing of a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn to hand deliver hundreds of protest letters to Congress, mailman Doug Hughes has put a new twist on the expression “going postal.” The FAA says it’s launching a full-scale investigation of the unauthorized flight. AOPA quickly labeled the stunt “unacceptable.” Most everybody else, meanwhile, […]

On the heels of Piper’s introduction of the Meridian M500 earlier this year, the company on Monday unveiled two additional models to its M-class lineup, the M350 and the Garmin G3000-equipped M600, at an event attended by hundreds of customers and dealers. In addition to its touchscreen G3000 avionics, the big news with the M600 […]

A little more than a year after Glasair first announced its new light-sport Merlin, the airplane made its first flight last week from the company’s facility at the Arlington Municipal Airport in Arlington, Washington. The flight lasted 57 minutes with Glasair test pilot Grant Smith, who evaluated the performance of the Rotax 912 iS engine […]

While the membership-based air taxi concept that promised to darken the skies with very light jets has not traditionally seen success, a new idea is taking off in southern California. Surf Air, which launched an all-you-can-fly membership-based concept in 2013, is expanding its network of destinations. After seeing a 40 percent increase in its exclusive […]

Flight Design conducted the first flight of the C4 prototype in Germany last Thursday, officially launching the test phase for the first general aviation airplane scheduled to be certified under new rules designed to improve safety and bring down the costs of future light aircraft. Flight Design conducted the first flight at its headquarters in […]

For fans of California-based Icon Aircraft, the anticipation of a new kind of light-sport airplane for a new kind of pilot is on the verge of becoming a full-fledged reality. Icon has completed the first customer A5 light-sport amphibian, which it plans to fly later this month and deliver in June after final FAA approval […]

Investigators say the pilot of a twin-turboprop Piper Cheyenne that crashed short of the runway at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport on Sunday reported smoke in the cockpit minutes before the airplane went down in a wooded area in a south Florida nature preserve. All four people were killed in the crash at about 4:25 p.m. […]

An Alaska Airlines flight made an emergency landing on Monday when the pilot discovered someone trapped in the front cargo hold, officials said. Flight 448 was bound for Los Angeles but had to return to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport about 14 minutes later when the captain reported that he heard banging coming from underneath the plane, […]

A student pilot who survived a helicopter crash in December has filed lawsuits claiming his instructor was using FaceTime, a popular video chat application, on his cell phone during the instructional flight in a Robinson R22. The lawsuits were filed by the student, Jonathan Desouza, and his lawyer against the flight school that operated the […]

Is it time to rename the 59-year-old international avionics association? The Aircraft Electronics Association (AEA), currently holding its annual convention in Dallas, might want to think about calling itself the ADS-B Association. Much of the news and talk at the event, which was sold out to exhibitors and filling up with attendees by Thursday, centered […]