Aviation News

A recent patent awarded to Airbus by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicates engineers at the industry giant have quite a unique design up their sleeves – a double fuselage airliner, to be exact. Design drawings associated with the patent, filed in 2008, show the fuselages connected by way of two forward-swept wings, with […]

The Solar Impulse HB-SIA concept airplane has cleared another hurdle and successfully completed a flight from Rabat-Salé International Airport outside Rabat, Morocco, to Ouarzazate. This was the most challenging flight to date for the test mission in preparation for a round-the-world flight scheduled to take place in 2014, according to the Swiss company. At an […]

Gamera II, a giant human-powered helicopter developed by students at the University of Maryland’s Clark School, has been vying this week for both new world records and the $250,000 Sikorsky Prize. On Thursday, the team made an unofficial 40-second human powered flight, shattering the group’s previous 11.4-second record set with a flight of the Gamera […]

JetBlue Flight 194 was forced to return for Las Vegas McCarran International Airport after the Airbus A320 suffered a loss of two of its hydraulic systems on Sunday. The pilots determined they needed to turn back and declared an emergency, but first they had to burn off a large amount of fuel. That maneuvering took […]

As investigators continue to probe the fatal 2011 crash of a Gulfstream G650 test aircraft, the NTSB recently voiced some harsh words regarding Gulfstream’s handling of the investigation. In a letter dated April 4, 2012, NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman outlined a number of offenses committed by the bizjet giant, including information withholding, noncompliance with NTSB […]

An FAA aviation rulemaking committee has released its report on the state of FAA airman knowledge tests, and the news is good for pilots. The committee was composed of many of the most forward-thinking and experienced pilot-educators in the industry, and their findings represent the cutting edge of opinion on testing. The authors spared no […]

The upcoming integration of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the National Airspace System within the next few years has local, county, state and federal agencies pining for drones, this according to a story in the Christian Science Monitor. The story points to the public’s conflicted view of drone operations — they like them for hunting […]

The Pilatus PC-12 that crashed near Lakeland earlier this month had changed course to avoid bad weather directly before the crash, according to a preliminary report released by the NTSB this week. The NTSB cited ATC transmissions showing a controller warning the 45-year-old Pilatus PC-12 pilot of a sizeable area of precipitation northwest of Lakeland […]

After spending 15 months in orbit conducting classified missions, the Air Force’s unmanned X-37B space plane made its way back to Earth over the weekend, touching down at Vandenberg Air Force Base early Saturday morning. The landing marks the second arrival of the secret space plane – a craft first initiated by NASA in 1999 […]

Hawker Beechcraft’s path to solvency will likely include a major decrease in bizjet production, according to a recent report by the Wichita Eagle. As part of its recent bankruptcy filing, Hawker Beechcraft submitted a “Project Flight” plan outlining three potential options for moving forward, all of which preserve the company’s piston, King Air and military […]