Aviation News

Australia’s biggest airshow, the Australian International Airshow and Aerospace & Defence Exposition, runs all this week at Avalon Airport, with about 350 civil and military aircraft on display and nearly 700 exhibitors. The event operates as a trade show Tuesday through Thursday and opens to the public Friday through Sunday, with a range of airshow […]

It’s getting so a poor blogger can’t catch a breath around here. No sooner do I write about NASA considering sending the first Orion mission around the moon than along comes Elon Musk to say, never mind, we’re going next year. While fellow billionaire Richard Branson struggles to shoot a few tourists on a crummy […]

SpaceX will send two people on a trip around the Moon next year in a Falcon Heavy rocket, the company announced on Monday. The two private citizens, whose names have not yet been released, have already paid “a significant deposit,” SpaceX said. “Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying […]

Here’s an aerospace story that hasn’t generated much notice. The Trump White House is apparently pushing NASA to consider making the first flight of the new Orion manned space system a circumlunar flight, rather than an unmanned test mission. That has a nice, if somewhat melancholy, resonance to it. Fifty years after the fact, we […]

NASA’s Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) preliminary design model is entering an eight-week testing phase at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, the agency reports. The Glenn Research Center wind tunnel will simulate speeds from Mach 0.3 to Mach 1.6 to ensure smooth airflow into the engine during all phases of flight and to confirm […]

Pilots continue to report increasing numbers of suspected in-flight sightings of small unmanned aerial systems (sUAS) to air traffic control, says data released Thursday by the FAA. Pilots reported 1,274 sightings of sUAS in areas where those systems are not authorized to operate for the February 2016 through September 2016 reporting period. Those figures are […]

A new training and simulation center for the ATR -600 series of twin turbopropeller commuter aircraft was opened to customers in Florida this week, the company announced on Tuesday. The new ATR full flight simulator is located at the existing Airbus Training Center across the street from Miami International Airport. ATR is a joint venture […]

A $35 million lawsuit filed against Van’s Aircraft, characterized by Van’s as an attack on the kitplane industry as a whole, was settled by the parties late last year. In a press release issued Wednesday, Van’s said the case was dismissed, which is accurate, though it omitted the reason for the dismissal. Van’s Aircraft told […]

I mostly fly aircraft certificated under Part 23, but last month, I had five flights in a row in four different light sport aircraft. All this light sport flying got me thinking about an opinion piece I read years ago with the self-explanatory title: “The Skycatcher’s Death Proves the LSA Rule is a Failure.” That […]

A team of Russian engineers working in San Francisco as Hoversurf have posted a video online showing an indoor flight test with their “hoverbike” design. The vehicle is powered by electric motors that drive four rotors, arrayed vertically at each corner. The pilot sits in a sort of saddle with his legs on either side, […]