Aviation News

The Dream Chaser, a reusable crewed space shuttle currently under development by Sierra Nevada Corporation, may one day carry people into space with the help of Stratolaunch’s massive carrier plane, the brainchild of aviation legend Burt Rutan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The news comes on the heels of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s announcement that it […]

On a Thursday in March 2013, the 500-hour pilot of a Mooney M20E arrived at Angel Fire, a ski resort east of Taos in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. With him were his girlfriend, his sister and his sister’s 13-year-old daughter. They came from San Antonio, stayed with a cousin of the […]

Air traffic levels were slowly returning to normal in the skies over Chicago after a fire on Friday morning at a busy Air Route Traffic Control Center put a halt to all area arrivals and departures, leading to the cancellations of more than 3,500 flights. FAA Administrator Michael Huerta has ordered a 30-day review of […]

After restarting production in Kerrville, Texas, following a hiatus, Mooney has seen strong interest in the turbo-normalized Acclaim Type S — the fastest single-engine piston airplane on the market — along with its normally-aspirated sibling, the Ovation 3. Mooney announced this week that since the first Acclaim was delivered at AirVenture this summer, where 10 […]

What started as a fun-filled Young Eagles event on Saturday at the Buffalo-Lancaster Airport in Lancaster, New York, with philanthropic pilots giving rides to young potential aviators, ended in tragedy as a Cessna 172 and an experimental Searey collided. The pilot of the Cessna and his 14-year-old passenger died in the crash that resulted from […]

How did a highly advanced avionics system built for multimillion-dollar business jets wind up in the cockpit of a stock Beech Bonanza? Sorry, the Rockwell Collins Pro Line Fusion flight deck isn’t a new option coming soon from Beechcraft. Instead, the Bonanza featured in the video below is serving as a flying test bed for […]

Like everyone else, I had assumed that Bob Hoover was already a Wright Brothers Memorial award winner. Now we can say that he really is. Yesterday the National Aeronautic Association’s selection committee voted Bob Hoover the winner for 2014, beating out a very distinguished group of nominees in the process. Hoover’s story is legend. A […]

The FAA’s progress on ADS-B implementation isn’t going nearly as well as the agency would like us all to believe, according to a scathing report released yesterday by the Department of Transportation’s Inspector General. Despite completing installations of 634 ADS-B ground towers** “on time and on budget,”** the DOT report says the FAA has identified […]

When Steve Allen, a highly respected Northern California ag pilot with 26,000 accident free hours, crashed his Rockwell S-2R into a whisper-thin, barely visible galvanized steel wind observation tower on January 11, 2011, a dark and sickening secret about personal greed and avarice was exposed for all the world to see. The $6.7 million wrongful […]

After a continued battle between UAV operators and the FAA, the agency has reached a decision to allow for more extensive commercial use of drones for the purpose of film production. The agency said today it has granted regulatory exemptions to six video production companies, the first step in allowing the film and television industry […]