Interesting Airplanes

NASA formally unveiled its electric airplane test bed last week and the Maxwell (more formally the X-57) will be the agency’s first manned aircraft project in 20 years. The aircraft, which is based on a Tecnam 2006 light twin, is still at least a year from its first flight but the two largest of its […]

A Canadian seaplane airline expects to flight test an electrically powered De Havilland Beaver before the end of the year with an eye to flying passengers in 2022. As we reported earlier this year, Harbour Air, which flies about 40 floatplanes to islands and coastal communities on the west coast of British Columbia, announced it […]

Legendary aircraft designer Burt Rutan has reportedly turned his outside-the-box vision toward eVTOL transportation and he’s already said to prepare for something different. “It’s pretty different from the 170 different outfits that are doing eVTOL now,” he is quoted as saying by Aviation Week. “And that’s all I can say about it.”  Rutan “retired” in […]

At NBAA-BACE 2019 in Las Vegas, Embraer marked the recent certification of its refreshed line of midsize business jets with the announcement of a firm order from FlexJet worth $1.4 billion. The fractional operator will take a mix of 64 aircraft, including an unspecified number of new Praetor 500 and 600 jets. The balance of […]

Timing, as they say, is everything and the tragic crash of the Collings Foundation B-17 in Connecticut earlier this month came a month after it submitted its application for exemptions to various FAA rules that allow it to fly its collection of aircraft and carry paying passengers to help cover expenses. The group is now […]

Kitty Hawk’s latest entry into the incipient urban mobility market is missing something important and it might be its biggest selling point. The new Heaviside (named for Oliver Heaviside, a controversial early 20th century physicist and electrical engineer) is virtually silent in flight with a noise level of about 38 decibels at 1,500 feet. Helicopters […]

John Travolta’s Boeing 707 is the gift that keeps on taking and he likely won’t be making a farewell trip to Australia in the plane this November. Travolta, who has owned the aircraft since 1998, has donated it to Historical Aircraft Restoration Society in Albion Park, about 100 miles south of Sydney. The plan was […]

Boeing’s next generation 777X project suffered a setback on Thursday when a door blew off during pressurization tests. There were no injuries in the mishap, which occurred on the static test plane, an aircraft that is shrouded by protective and structural metal superstructure to put massive stress on the airframe, sometimes to the point of […]

After a 22-minute flight into the history books, Franky Zapata says he needs a break. The colorful Frenchman crossed the English Channel on the jet-powered hoverboard he invented on Sunday. It was his second attempt. He tried the same feat on July 25, the 110th anniversary of Louis Bleriot’s first flight over the 30-mile shipping […]

The next generation of autoland systems may not require any ILS signals to guide them. Scientists at the Technical University of Munich have equipped a Diamond DA42 with a system called C2Land that allows the aircraft to visually acquire the runway and then calculate a glideslope to put it on the numbers. Because the computer […]