briefs

While we don’t know how much a used 707 goes for these days, the $31 million hangar taxpayers are funding to keep the rain off one to be based in California might be a bid worth considering. Of course, this is no ordinary 707. It’s the old turbojet that carried Ronald Reagan to the far […]

The implementation of the Light Sport Aircraft category passed a significant milestone last week, but you still can’t buy one. The FAA signed off on the industry-developed consensus standards for S-LSA aircraft (which are factory-built and ready to fly) and E-LSA aircraft (which require at least a token amount of construction by the owner). A […]

The FAA is declining comment (for now, at least) on a court case in Texas that determined the agency was misled on the cause of Lycoming engine crankshaft failures that caused 24 crashes and killed 12 people between 2000 and 2002. As AVweb told you last Thursday, a Grimes County jury found that Lycoming had […]

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_______COLUMNS The Savvy Aviator #15: The Annual Inspection TrapYour airplane is undergoing its annual inspection, and the shop tells you the aircraft needs some costly repair work. You disagree, but the IA says he’s unwilling to sign off the annual until the work is done. What are your options?

In the chicken-and-egg world of aircraft design, it’s not often a turboprop is copied from a pure jet. But that’s exactly what the fertile minds at Aerocomp have come up with for their next homebuilt. The Comp Air 12 uses the same fuselage, wing and empennage as the Comp Air Jet, currently undergoing initial flight […]

Is the nondirectional beacon (NDB) going the way of the Dodo? Well, not quite, but its extinction is closer with an FAA program to weed out underused NDB approaches around the country so it can spend more money developing GPS-WAAS approaches. Now, there are some airports that still rely heavily on NDB approaches and the […]

The first on-ramp to the Highway In The Sky opens June 5. That’s when NASA’s Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) undergoes its first demonstration at Danville Airport in Virginia. While Boeing and Airbus work on bigger planes that can fly fatter … and farther … SATS is dedicated to creating infrastructure for point-to-point air travel […]

British researchers say they have the answer to minimize the impact of air travel on global warming. Imperial College scientists say contrails should be a major consideration in determining the environmental factors at play as air travel increases by up to 5 percent a year. The council wants aircraft manufacturers to design planes that can […]