Jets

__One of the things I love best about airplanes is their back stories. While the **Embraer Legacy 650** is a brand-new airplane, its story stretches back 30 years to when the Brazilian company first decided to start building airliners. My personal tour of the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 650 immediately reminded me of the […]

Boeing has completed flight trials of the 787-8 Dreamliner, with the final round of testing occurring on a 90-minute flight last weekend from Billings, Montana, to Everett, Washington. Boeing is now preparing to make the first delivery of a 787-8 equipped with Rolls-Royce engines to Japan’s All Nippon Airways next month. Flight testing continues for […]

The FAA has awarded supplemental type certification for the Hawker 800XPR. The STC, available exclusively from Hawker Beechcraft Global Customer Support (GCS), is an upgrade package for the 800XP that includes Honeywell‘s TFE731-50R engines and Hawker winglets. Honeywell’s TFE731-50R engines are capable of producing 5,000 pounds of thrust, but have been flat rated to 4,660 […]

The SubSonex Jet, one very, very light jet powered by a Czech-built PBS TJ-100 turbine engine, took off for its first flight in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, last week, bringing the prospect of a recreational jet for private pilots one step closer to reality. Renowned airshow pilot Bob Carlton, famous for his performances in a modified Salto […]

Learjet. It sounds fast and it is. This airplane has had a place in our aviation consciousness for a long time as the ultimate in speed, wealth, luxury and convenience. When first introduced by Bill Lear in 1964 it became synonymous with these things and more. Lear had bought the tooling for a Swiss ground-attack […]

Piper Aircraft Inc. is taking a mock-up of its PiperJet Altaire on the road, along with a message of the company’s commitment to the development of the single-engine very light jet. While the mock-up was on display at EAA AirVenture last week, Piper announced that the company has started fabrication of the Altaire’s first conforming […]

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner touched down at Wittman Regional Airport in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on Friday morning for the composite-construction airliner’s highly anticipated public debut in North America. It spent the day parked on the EAA AirVenture display line, and was open to anyone who wanted to walk through. This was the first time the public was […]

Aerostar Aircraft Corporation showed up on Tuesday at AirVenture with a Pratt & Whitney PW615-powered 601P Aerostar modification. It was the first public showing of the airplane, which is undergoing early flight test and configuration. The airplane is a work in progress in many respects. There are no boots on it yet. The pressurization system […]

The title of this article is a bit strange, so I will explain. For six years I was “engaged” to an Eclipse VLJ, but the romance dissolved when the originally promised range did not materialize. I sold my delivery position (see the July 2008 Flying article “My Torrid Affair with a VLJ”). I continued to […]

The super-massive Airbus A380 has had another run in with a stationary object, but this time it was a building at Le Bourget Airport on the eve of the Paris Air Show rather than a commuter jet. Still, the taxiway incident, in which the A380’s right wingtip was sheared off on June 19 as it […]