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Just because you’ve flown with some ice before doesn’t mean your aircraft will take off with what’s on the wing, now. Fine particles of frost or ice the size of a grain of table salt and distributed as sparsely as one per square centimeter over an airplane wing’s upper surface can destroy enough lift to […]

Just Looking Is Not Enough In an unusual move last week, the NTSB issued an Alert Letter directly to pilots, advising them to conduct visual and tactile inspections of airplane wing upper surfaces to check for ice and frost. The safety board said that the Nov. 28 accident at Montrose, Colo., involving a Bombardier Challenger […]

Friday’s flights mark a milestone for the company, which delayed flight testing for almost two years after its first choice of Williams International engines didn’t pan out. On Friday, the prototype jet climbed to 16,800 feet and reached 200 knots during the first tests, and completed all scheduled tasks. (See it for yourself: Eclipse has […]

Off The Drawing Board At Last Eclipse Aviation‘s first Eclipse 500 certification aircraft flew twice on Friday, just making the company’s own deadline. “As we promised on January 31, 2003, we have resumed flight testing by December 31, 2004, with the PW610F engines,” CEO Vern Raburn said in a news release on Friday. Aircraft N503EA, […]

You can also volunteer to fly for homeland security and disaster relief efforts. Civil Air Patrol pilots fly those missions, as well as search-and-rescue and counterdrug reconnaissance. They transport medical personnel and supplies, and in times of disaster, they assess damage and transport emergency personnel from site to site. The CAP owns the largest fleet […]

Fly For Humanity It’s that time of year for reflecting on what we’ve achieved with a year’s worth of time on earth, and maybe making resolutions that in the year to come will make us better citizens of the world. For those so endowed and those so inclined, aviation offers plenty of opportunities to help […]

Hartzell Propeller Inc. announced on Tuesday that its blended-airfoil propeller system for the Adam Aircraft A500 centerline-twin has passed the final hurdle for certification on the aircraft. A recent FAA regulation requires all new pusher-propeller installations, such as the aft propeller on the Adam A500, to ingest airframe ice shed during an inadvertent icing encounter […]

Epic “On Time And On Budget” Rick Schramek of Epic Aircraft told AVweb on Tuesday that the Epic Jet prototype is about 85 percent complete. “The T-tail and the nacelles are on, and the nosecone goes on in January,” he said. “About 75 percent of it is the same as the LT, so that makes […]

The X Prize was just the beginning. Thanks to Mojave Aerospace Ventures, spaceships are now part of the GA world. The BBC News reported on Monday that Virgin Galactic‘s fleet of five spaceships, to be built by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, will have luxury accommodations for up to eight passengers and will be capable of […]

New Year, New Rules With a new year right around the corner, the landscape of aviation is about to experience some changes. Workers at the FAA’s Flight Service Stations are awaiting a decision, expected in January, on who will run their operations in the future. Air traffic controllers may soon suffer the pangs of “Be […]