briefs

Helicopters can perform amazing vertical feats, but their Achilles’ heel has always been forward speeds limited by the retreating blades’ ability to create lift. Usually, the machines max out at about 170 knots. Efforts to increase forward speed have previously resulted in degraded hover performance. While Bell inches its Bell/Agusta 609 tiltroter’s nacelles toward full […]

A team of engineers got a lot of attention when they bolted some wings onto a $100,000 Panoz Esperante sports car and got it (briefly) off the ground, for a Monster Garage episode that aired this week. But meanwhile, the real flying car may be quietly under development in the garages of a few homebuilders, […]

Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has released some details about its future plans, as it works with the FAA to gain approvals to develop its site in Culberson County, Texas. The company’s reusable launch vehicle (RLV) would carry three or more passengers to 325,000 feet, propelled by hydrogen peroxide […]

While the Paris Air Show, held every other June at Le Bourget, is mainly about big airliners and beefy military aircraft, there’s a fair amount of news there for the lighter, GA end of the industry. Among the latest out of Paris this week, Grob, a German light-plane manufacturer, introduced the first test model of […]

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AVmail: June 13, 2005Reader mail this week about the New York TRACON, flat panel displays, photo submissions and more.

COLUMNS The Pilot’s Lounge #88: The Air Care Alliance — Helping Those Who Fly to Help OthersWhether they go on flights for documenting environmental degradation or for transporting kids for medical treatment, hundreds of pilots in dozens of organizations work tirelessly to provide special aviation duties. AVweb’s Rick Durden tells about the central source of […]

The man whose nimble little biplane spawned a whole segment of aviation design, competition and just plain fun died Friday. Curtis Pitts, whose Pitts Special became the standard for sport aviation for 60 years, was 89. He died in the hospital from complications resulting from a heart valve replacement. EAA President Tom Poberezny, who has […]

For those who think airspace congestion is the evil empire, a Berkeley professor is striking back with a mathematical force he believes will be with aviators in the future. “The long term vision is a bit like what you might see in Star Wars films when streams of aircraft in the sky are crisscrossing each […]