Aviation News

The Australian newspaper is reporting that a Dornier commuter plane was forced to return for a landing at Brisbane after the airplane’s flight instruments malfunctioned. The cause: green caterpillars were found to be clogging the pitot static system. There were no injuries. The Australian went on to report that when asked, a spokesman for the […]

The safety of several Indian airlines has come into question after investigators uncovered scores of extreme violations. Pilots from IndiGo and MDLR airlines were caught flying passengers with forged qualifications, and shortly thereafter a list emerged of 56 airline pilots who had failed sobriety tests in the past two years. The drunken pilots were employed […]

FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has been tapped to deliver one of the keynote speeches at the upcoming Pilot Training Reform Symposium, to be hosted by the Society of Aviation and Flight Educators (SAFE) May 4 and 5 in Atlanta. Babbitt’s address, “Meeting the Training Challenges of the Second Century Of Flight,” is just one of […]

The 2010 Nall Report analyzing accident data from 2009 has been released, and the findings are troubling. While at first glance the numbers appeared to show improvements in the past decade with a total of 1,418 general aviation accidents, 255 of which resulted in fatalities, they did not tell the whole story. The decrease in […]

The team behind Sikorsky’s X2 technology demonstrator has won the 2010 Robert J. Collier Trophy, six months after the unique twin-coaxial rotorcraft set an unofficial speed record for a helicopter of 250 knots. “Sikorsky has a long and storied history of innovation, starting with the invention of the world’s first practical helicopter and continuing today […]

Aviation interests are among the nearly 20 founding members of the “Coalition to Save Our GPS,” a group created to reverse the successful application by LightSquared LLC for a nationwide satellite broadband service that experts say could interfere with GPS receivers. Announced on March 10 in Washington, D.C., the coalition includes the Air Transport Association, […]

The FAA has issued an airworthiness directive reducing the Eclipse EA500‘s maximum ceiling to 30,000 feet after several reported instances of engine surging. This is the second time the FAA has sought to lower the Eclipse 500’s ceiling because of problems with the airplane’s Pratt & Whitney Canada PW610F-A engines. A 2008 AD reduced the […]

HondaJet has indefinitely postponed a planned media tour of the company’s Greensboro, North Carolina, headquarters after the devastating 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan on March 11. In a statement last Friday to invited media, the company wrote, “As you have surely heard by now, the country of Japan has just suffered an […]

When he arrived in 1970 for his new job at the Experimental Aviation Association in its then-home of Hales Corner, Wisconsin, Jack Cox surely had no idea what changes he’d see at the organization, watching it grow from a still-homey grassroots homebuilding enthusiast group with a big summer gathering to a world-class sport and personal […]

Diamond Aircraft has announced that it is developing a new engine in conjunction with Streyr, a longtime maker of diesel engines for the marine market. While the company released few details on the engine, it is known that it will be a 280 hp in-line six-cylinder diesel — Diamond apparently prefers the terms “jet fuel […]