Aviation News

No longer constrained to tethered flight, Airbus’s VSR700 has completed its first free flight. According to the company, the VSR few for 10 minutes at the drone center near Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. We had previously reported on the VSR’s first tethered flights last November.  To enable safe free flight, Airbus enabled active […]

The International Air Transport Association’s latest forecast for global travel has slipped the “break even” point by a year, predicting that airline travel will not rise to meet pre-COVID-19 levels until 2024 and that the total falloff in 2020 will be deeper than originally expected. “The recovery in short haul travel is still expected to […]

Many homebuilt aircraft are rightly considered hot rods, with small airframes and big engines. While Van’s Aircraft, by far the volume leader in kits sold today, has not changed the size of its RV-14 two-seat kitbuilt, it has spec’d a new version of Lycoming’s IO-390 engine to give it more performance. Called the IO-390-EXP119, the […]

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a rule last week that would set greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for some commercial aircraft. According to the agency, the rule would match international airplane carbon dioxide (CO2) standards adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in 2017. The rule (PDF) would apply to jets with maximum […]

The Wright Brothers had Kitty Hawk, supersonic flight had Muroc, and now Bell’s Autonomous Pod Transport (APT) has rural Oklahoma, where the APT last week managed an important milestone in autonomy—flying beyond visual line of sight from its test team. According to Bell, the APT had already been proving that “it can handle this type […]

A Delta flight from Detroit to Atlanta last week returned to its departure airport after two passengers refused to wear face masks aboard, according to multiple reports. The Detroit Free Press quotes Delta personnel saying that the “customers in question were removed due to non-compliance with Delta’s mask requirement.” Flight 1227 eventually made it to Atlanta minus […]

If you’ve noticed the local forecast is a little shakier than usual, you can indirectly blame the pandemic. The drastic reduction in air traffic has curtailed the flow of information from weather sensors attached to 350 of airliners as part of their Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System or ACARS. The main role of ACARS […]

The USAF Thunderbirds will do a full airshow performance in September but only Canadians will get to see it. Ditto the U.S. Army Golden Knights parachute team, the F-22 Raptor demo team and C-17 demo team. The London (Ontario) Airshow is going ahead Sept. 12-13 as a drive-in event with room for 2500 vehicles. The […]

Airbus has flown a new A350-1000 without the help of pilots 500 times in a research project that involved equipping the huge airliner with a form of machine vision it calls “image recognition technology.” The system uses external cameras and processes the resulting images to make the myriad adjustments necessary in the various phases of […]

Some congressional heavyweights are leaning on the Department of Transportation to finalize a Pilots Records Database they say would provide “one level of safety” for airline passengers. The database was included as part of the contentious 2010 FAA reauthorization bill and mandatory reporting requirements by those employing pilots has yet to be formalized as a […]