Aviation News

I’m wondering if we’re seeing a canary in the mineshaft moment here. This week, with the news that Seattle-based Horizon Air is cancelling more than 6 percent of its flights due to lack of pilots, the supposed true-or-not-true pilot shortage seems to be coming to a head. Actually, I think the canary has been dead […]

It all started a few decades ago in a place 8500 miles away. Walt Fricke was in the copilot’s seat of an Army helo in the midst of the chaos of a combat assault in Vietnam. When the crew fired the air-to-ground rockets, one exploded leaving the tube. Shrapnel blasted into one of Walt’s legs, […]

A good friend of mine who’s an aircraft broker called me this week to ask for my take on what to do about ADS-B installations. He has to have a ready answer for buyers and sellers of legacy airplanes who are asking about this. What was I telling people, he wondered, laboring under the misguided […]

A deHavilland Mosquito T Mk III, which was restored and test-flown in New Zealand, flew for the first time in the U.S. last Friday in at Paine Field, in Everett, Washington. The Mosquito now is based at the Flying Heritage & Combat Armor Museum, where it received a fresh coat of paint on arrival, plus […]

A dispute over noise caused by helicopters flying over the tony Hampton area outside New York City made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but this week, the judges said they won’t hear the case. The Town of East Hampton had petitioned the court last November, after a federal appeals court said the […]

If you haven’t caught Sean D. Tucker’s solo airshow performance in his 40-plus years on the circuit, you have this year and next, and then he plans to retire. Tucker, who turned 65 this year, told the Dayton Daily News that he hopes to find a sponsor to launch a formation flying team as his […]

Nextant, the Cleveland, Ohio, company that takes in older aircraft and remanufactures them with fresh upgrades, has announced a new “incremental” upgrade program for the Beech 400A/Hawker 400XP twinjet aircraft. The full conversion to an XTi costs about $3 million, the company says, a cost that “not everyone is able to justify.” Now Nextant is […]

NASA said on Monday it has achieved “a significant milestone” in its effort to make supersonic passenger jet travel over land a real possibility by completing the preliminary design review of its Quiet Supersonic Transport, or QueSST, aircraft design. QueSST is the initial design stage of NASA’s planned Low-Boom Flight Demonstration experimental X-plane. Senior experts […]

SpaceX launched two rockets in three days and brought both back to barges on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. On Friday, company CEO Elon Musk wasn’t sure he’d get his rocket back because it was going to endure the hottest and fastest re-entry to date. “Rocket is extra toasty and hit the deck hard (used […]

Last February, when I was planning a visit to Daher’s factory in Tarbes, France, I was surfing the web looking for airline fares when I saw one from Miami to Madrid for $640; outbound on Iberia, return on American. I see this sort of thing often enough to know that it’s not an everyday thing, […]