Aviation News

See the PiperJet proof-of-concept under construction Piper’s single-engine jet, seen here in real-life and in an artist’s rendering, is working its way through development. The company says that despite some changes to its design, the airplane is still on track for certification by the end of 2010. I recently visited the Piper factory and was […]

The 500-hour pilot held a private license for aircraft single-engine land. He did not have an instrument rating, but had been receiving instruction toward one. The airplane was a J35 Bonanza, manufactured in 1958 and equipped with tip tanks that increased its fuel capacity to 100 gallons. The pilot was solo when he left New […]

It’s what Sporty’s calls a “$500 solution to a $25,000 problem,” and that gets right to the point. The Arctic Air portable air conditioner, offered by Sporty’s, gives you air conditioned comfort for a small fraction of the cost of an installed system. And forget about the $500; you might win one for free by […]

At a media-only event at its Duluth, Minnesota, factory, Cirrus Design recently launched its single-engine, personal jet program by showing off a mockup of the airplane, which it calls “the-jet.” While the mockup revealed numerous details of the design, and while Cirrus was candid about all that it knew-and didn’t know-about the program, there remain […]

A 473-hour instrument-rated private pilot, alone in a fully fueled Cirrus SR22-G2, took off from Reno, Nevada, early on a Sunday evening in February 2005. The sun had set half an hour earlier; the moon, above a layer of clouds, was a mere sliver. He had filed an IFR flight plan via Truckee and Sacramento […]

Two pilots left South Jersey Regional Airport in a Piper Arrow at about five o’clock on an April afternoon for some instrument flying practice. The left seat pilot, with 334 hours, had single engine land and sea and instrument ratings; she had logged 100 hours of simulated and nine hours of actual instrument time, as […]

On a cloudless morning in April of this year, a C-5B transport of the 436th Airlift Wing took off from Dover AFB in Delaware, bound for Ramstein Air Base in Germany on a routine supply mission. The C-5 is the United States Air Force’s largest transport; this one’s takeoff weight was 742,000 pounds, including a […]

In the spring of 2002 a Beech D-45, the civilianized version of the Bonanza-derived T-34 Mentor military trainer, crashed while attempting a landing in gusty conditions at Minden, Louisiana. Both occupants of the tandem two-seat airplane were killed. The Mentor’s owner, a private pilot, had flown over 1,000 hours in it since acquiring it in […]