Aviation News

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 […]

In December 2000 a tower controller in southern Florida received a single radio transmission: “Mayday mayday mayday Pitts 260DB in an unrecoverable flat spin at 3,500 feet.” The airplane crashed in the Everglades, coming to rest partially inverted and nearly vertical in several feet of water. The canopy, which had been jettisoned in flight, was […]

The Biplane Expo, held every summer in the northeast Oklahoma city of Bartlesville, brings together two-winged creations from every era of flying history. Flying traveled to the 2006 edition of the Expo to check out the wings and meet the people who keep and fly these magnificent machines, some of which represent one of the […]

In May 1999, in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, a two-seat homebuilt GP-4 crashed shortly after takeoff, killing its 73-year-old builder and 60-year-old passenger. Both men were licensed pilots. The builder had logged 181.4 hours in the airplane since first flying it 15 months earlier. The weather at the time of the accident was clear and mild. According […]