Aviation News

Veteran airshow pilot and aerobatics instructor Patty Wagstaff was slightly injured when the V-tail Bonanza she was flying departed the runway and flipped on Wednesday at Northeast Florida Airport in St. Augustine Florida. Wagstaff tweeted that the aircraft suffered a mechanical problem but that she and her passenger, an instructor at her flight school, were […]

Clayton Turner has been selected as the next director of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine announced Monday. Turner joined NASA in 1990 as a design engineer with the Lidar In-Space Technology Experiment project and has served as Langley’s deputy director since 2015. He will replace David Bowles, who is […]

Two people were killed in the crash of a Convair 440 near Ohio’s Toledo Express Airport (TOL) on Wednesday. The aircraft went down at approximately 2:37 a.m. local time just east of Runway 25 at TOL, hitting several unoccupied vehicles parked at an automotive repair business about one mile from the airport. The cargo flight, […]

Shreveport-based Metro Aviation has accepted the first Airbus EC145e helicopter produced at the manufacturer’s Columbus, Mississippi, plant. It’s the first of 25 ships that Metro ordered in 2018.  “Metro is pleased to continue a long-term relationship with Airbus, providing aircraft that meet a wide range of customer needs, and we are especially happy with the […]

Low-cost Spirit Airlines announced new seats going into its fleet of Airbus aircraft that, while no farther apart, are said to be more comfortable and provide effectively more room between rows. Spirit claims that a new design will “allow for a wider range of healthy postures and movements, offering an additional two inches of usable […]

Austrian Airlines is testing out a new system that uses autonomous drones to inspect its aircraft for paintwork and structural damage. The company says it has been using the drones—supervised by an aircraft technician—to inspect its 36 Airbuses since the middle of the year. It plans to continue the tests until the end of 2019 […]

Airbus announced the delivery of its 1,000th Super Puma twin-engine utility helicopter on Friday. The aircraft, an H215 model, went to Germany’s Federal Police (Bundespolizei) for use by the agency’s maritime emergency management command. The delivery brings the Bundespolizei’s Super Puma fleet up to 23. According to Airbus, Super Puma helicopters are operated by nearly […]

Time waits for no man, nor any airplane. So explains American Airlines’ retirement of last week of the long-running McDonnell Douglas MD-80-series aircraft, known to pilots and fans of the design as Mad Dog. (Passengers relegated to the last two rows between the mighty Pratts might say “Maybe Deaf.”) The very last was American Flight […]

British Air has canceled “nearly 100 percent [of] our flights” due to an ongoing pay dispute with its pilots. “Unfortunately, with no detail from BALPA [the British Airline Pilots Association] on which pilots would strike, we had no way of predicting how many would come to work or which aircraft they are qualified to fly, […]

Australia’s Matt Hall became the last ever Red Bull Air Race champion on Sunday with a third-place finish in the event’s final race in Chiba, Japan. The third-place finish earned him enough points in the points race to win the overall championship for the truncated final year of the iconic race series. Japan’s Yoshide Muroya […]