News

A new bill that would reauthorize the nation’s aviation programs for another four years was introduced in the U.S. House on Monday. The bill does not call for any new aviation user fees, and would authorize nearly $70 billion in spending for the FAA through 2012. “This legislation is long overdue,” said U.S. Rep. James […]

Click for video of the Falcon 7X interior Here’s an example of what Cessna’s campaign is up against — on Wednesday, Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit apologized during a U.S. House Financial Services Committee hearing for almost taking delivery on a $50 million Falcon 7X bizjet. “I would also like to say something about the airplane […]

Cessna, along with the rest of the bizjet industry, has been watching its orders tank in the last two months, and on Wednesday the company launched a counterattack to all the bad publicity that started with those auto execs flying to Washington, hats in hand, in their cushy corporate jets. A new Web site and […]

The aviation industry may be going through tough times right now, but that’s not stopping entrepreneurs from moving forward with new projects. Icon Aircraft, based in southern California, announced this week that its Icon A5 amphibious light-sport aircraft has completed its phase-one flight testing. The A5 has a folding-wing design to make it easier to […]

In an aggressive new advertising campaign, Cessna is urging the captains of industry to stay the course and keep their business jets (or buy new ones) in the face of public backlash. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Cessna, which has lost a huge amount of business in the last two months, in part […]

The future of the cockpit weather service attached to most of the popular glass panels is in question with news that Sirius XM may be preparing a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing. The New York Times is reporting that the debt-ridden company has $175 million in debt coming due next week “that is unlikely to be […]

The finger-pointing has begun in the wake of news on Monday that hackers were able to get into the personnel files of 45,000 FAA employees. There was no breach of the computer systems that run the air traffic control system or any other critical systems but the security breakdown nevertheless raised some concerns. A total […]

From the unsung hero department comes an NTSB report of another airliner that suddenly became a glider and the reason we never heard about it at the time was because of the pilot’s apparently flawless forced landing at Naples Airport in Florida. The Cape Air Cessna 402 (operating as a Continental Connection flight) was en […]

While everyone else in the aviation world seems to be in a dark and deepening slump, none of that is rubbing off on Virgin CEO Sir Richard Branson. The irrepressible Brit brought his retinue of Virgin execs to Seattle the other day clad in T-shirts and shorts, while female cabin attendants sported bikinis, despite the […]

Nortel Networks has become the latest high-profile company to dump its corporate aircraft and it left the aircraft lessor holding the bag for the lease cancellation costs. Nortel, once a powerhouse in the dotcom world, filed for bankruptcy protection last month and one of its cost-cutting moves was to cancel the leases on its two […]