Aviation News

The CJ1+ program has “run its course,” said Robert Stangarone, vice president of communications at Cessna Aircraft Company. Having delivered three airplanes of this model in 2010 and with only two scheduled deliveries for this year, the company cites decreased customer demand as the reason for closing down its CJ1+ production line. First introduced in […]

In an event hosted inside a large hangar at the Cessna manufacturing facility on Monday, state and local government officials and industry spokespeople showed their support of Wichita’s ailing aviation businesses and its workers. More than 2,000 people attended the event, which was organized by GAMA in partnership with Cessna, Hawker Beechcraft and Bombardier Learjet. […]

The Lindbergh Foundation will present famed inventor and pilot Dean Kamen with this year’s Lindbergh Award next week at Sun ‘n Fun in Lakeland, Florida. Best known for inventing the Segway people mover, Kamen earned special recognition from the Lindbergh Foundation for his lifesaving inventions, including the insulin pump, and his work as the founder […]

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 […]