Aviation News

Last week, AOPA President Mark Baker appeared before the Senate Aviation and Space subcommittee to advocate against privatizing air traffic control. Baker told the committee that privatizing ATC would not reduce delays or speed up modernization, plus it could adversely affect smaller airports. “As you know, the past two years were spent dealing with a […]

Embraer’s Praetor 500 midsize business jet has received its FAA and EASA type certificates, according to a company announcement on Monday. The Praetor 500, an updated version of the Legacy 450, is powered by the Honeywell HTF7500E engine and comes equipped with the Collins Aerospace Pro Line Fusion flight deck. It has a 3,340-NM range, […]

NASA has successfully completed testing of a new high-aspect ratio wing for its X-57 Maxwell all-electric research aircraft. The goal of the wing tests, which took place at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California, was to “calibrate installed strain gauges for real-time loads monitoring and to verify the wing has met design specifications.” The […]

Thrush Aircraft has filed for bankruptcy and is in the process of reorganizing to continue operations. The Albany, Georgia-based company filed the paperwork Sept. 5 and laid off 113 employees. The company is a well-known producer of turboprop aerial application aircraft and recently jumped into the single-engine air tanker (SEAT) market with a model that […]

A helicopter giving rides to fairgoers at the Bloomsburg Fair in Pennsylvania crashed Saturday night, injuring the pilot and two passengers onboard but missing everyone in the parking lot where it came down. The Enstrom 28F was close to the ground, either taking off or landing, when something went wrong and it came down on […]

Pilots are trained to recognize stalls and recover from them, but are they as well trained at avoiding them in the first place? In this, our second in a five-part series on stall accidents, veteran instructor Dan Gryder says no. Taking a page from the airline world, where there’s a number and a procedure for […]

As airliner seats get smaller and Americans get bigger, the FAA has decided to quantify the effect seat size (on the airplane) has on safety. Deputy Administrator Dan Elwell announced the agency will conduct 12 days of emergency evacuation testing at the end of November to see if stuffing ever growing, uh, masses into progressively […]

SpaceX has formally unveiled the massive retro-looking spacecraft it intends to use for interplanetary flights and CEO Elon Musk says it could be doing earth orbit flights within six months. The Starship is made of stainless steel, stands 164 feet tall and is 30 feet in diameter and that’s just the spacecraft. The massive booster […]

The FAA has ordered operators of some of the hard-working fleet of Boeing 737NGs to conduct inspections for cracks in a critical structural assembly that have shown up in some NGs. Boeing found cracks in a plane that had about 35,000 cycles on it, less than half the 90,000 that the “pickle fork” is designed […]

The Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) and the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA) unveiled a new program on Thursday designed to provide hands-on opportunities for young people to build and fly radio-control (R/C) aircraft. According to EAA, the Young Eagles Build and Fly “program-in-a-box” will partner local EAA chapters with AMA clubs to create youth-oriented build […]