leadnews

Boeing’s Sweet Tanker Deal Turns Sour… In the latest of a long series of bad days for Boeing, on Tuesday the Pentagon said it will put on hold the manufacturer’s lucrative but controversial $20 billion deal to sell 80 KC-767 airborne refueling planes to the Air Force and lease them 20 more. The contract was […]

OMFAircraft, manufacturer of the two-seat Symphony 160 (with plans to introduce a diesel version and later a four-place), has laid off its production workers and halted the production line at its Quebec manufacturing plant, the company said yesterday in a statement, but added that the halt is expected to be temporary. The Quebec plant opened […]

Adam Aircraft Still Zipping Along… With the first flight of its A700 twinjet this summer, Adam Aircraft leapfrogged to the front of the small-jet race, and according to yesterday’s online conference with CEO Rick Adam, the company is making steady progress on both its twinjet and the piston A500 design. FAA certification and first customer […]

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., the intrepid folks at the FASTec project, based in Worcester, Mass., are working away on their hydrogen-powered electric airplane. “We expect our first flight sometime in late December or maybe early January,” Jim Dunn, director of the project, told AVweb on Saturday. Advanced high-energy, lithium-ion batteries will power the first […]

Balloonist Seeks Solar First… Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard, who in 1999 was the first to fly nonstop around the world in a balloon, announced Friday he has set his sights on a new project — to develop an airplane both powered by the sun and capable of circling the earth. Piccard’s co-pilot on the 1999 […]

Why didn’t the president fly in a fighter or some kind of burly attack aircraft? Probably because Air Force One is safer, and better-equipped, than any other airplane out there. “Air Force One has a wide array of countermeasure capabilities for foiling surface-to-air missiles, some of which have never been disclosed to the public,” defense […]

Two hours later, the airplane touched down and rolled into a hangar at the 140,000-square-foot maintenance and support complex at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, D.C., where the 747’s sister ship awaited. The other 747 was all fueled and catered and ready for the 10 1/2 hour flight to Baghdad. Inside the hangar, the […]

How A Baghdad-Bound 747 Turns Invisible… So how do you fly a Boeing 747-200B, over five stories high and more than 200 feet long, carrying a gaggle of reporters and the U.S. president and his staff, halfway across the world’s airspace, without anybody noticing? Well, it isn’t easy. First, you hustle the press pool off, […]

Pratt & Whitney had luck with their own during ground tests, and now NASA, after blowing up its first scramjet prototype (for safety reasons) on a test flight in 2001, says it might be ready to test another unmanned X-43A X-43C in mid-December. “We have a tentative, and put a line under that word, test-flight […]

Paris To Tokyo In Two Hours… As a British Airways Concorde was barged to its new home alongside the Intrepid Museum in New York, the corporate descendents of its creator were musing about an even more spectacular sequel to the now-retired supersonic airliner. European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company (EADS) is considering building a hypersonic […]