Aviation News

Every once in a while, it’s fun to cast off the wispy tendrils connecting sanity to what passes for reality these days and consider a real crack pipe concept: What if Elon Musk made airplanes? This occurred to me this week when the news broke that tech billionaire Jeff Bezos plans to build a giant […]

The FAA said on Tuesday it will launch its ADS-B $500 rebate program next Monday, Sept. 19. The program will fund 20,0000 rebates, available on a first-come, first-served basis. “We promised that we would help aircraft owners equip with ADS-B, and I am pleased to say that today we are honoring that commitment and we […]

Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced Monday a new family of heavy boosters capable of putting manned and heavy cargo payloads into earth orbit and beyond. Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said there will be both two- and three-stage versions of the booster and that one version will be capable of […]

Try this thought experiment: Before USAir 1549 splashed down in the Hudson, if you put 10 airline crews in a simulator and ran the same scenario, how many would achieve results identical to the real event? Hold that thought for a moment, I’ll get back to it. Of course, you can’t unknow the details of […]

Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, flew a first trial Thursday as the company continues to develop the newest version of its space-tourism vehicle. Virgin Galactic called the test, which lasted 3 hours and 43 minutes, a “captive carry” trial, during which the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft carried the space vehicle throughout the flight to monitor performance. […]

Drones hovering over fires have often been the bane of firefighters, but now special versions of the unmanned aircraft are going to be put to work on emergency response teams. The New York City Fire Department is training some of its crews to deploy bright red drones to view fires using video and infrared cameras,according […]

AVweb‘s search of news in aviation found announcements from Able Flight, Partners in Aviation, L-3 Aviation Products and Yingling Aviation.Able Flight and Lockheed Martin announced a scholarship to aid wounded warriors of the United States armed services. The Lockheed Martin Fighting Spirit Scholarship provides sports and physical activity programs for wounded veterans.Partners in Aviation, recently […]

From the unintended consequences file comes this: The Third Class medical exemption rips away the last vestiges of logic—if there ever was any—for retaining the weight limit for light sport aircraft. If you can fly a 6000-pound airplane without a medical, why are you limited to 1320 pounds under essentially the same conditions?The whole thing […]

There’s been a lot of talk lately about a shortage of pilots for both military and civilian jobs, and now the U.S. Air Force says it has to hire private contractors to fly its drones. The contract drone pilots are not allowed to fire weapons, but they can operate reconnaissance missions, according to a story […]

Researchers at NASA are “investigating promising advances” in high-temperature materials that can be used to make turbine engines run more efficiently, the agency said last week. The materials, called ceramic-matrix composites, or CMCs, are lighter and stronger than the metal alloys used today, and can withstand the extremely high temperatures of 2700 degrees Fahrenheit and […]