News

Cessna announced a further 2,000 layoffs last week, bringing the company-wide total to 4,600. Most of the layoffs hitting workers in Wichita. However, the company’s Bend, Ore., facility (where the Corvalis — previously Columbia — series is manufactured) is losing another 120 as part of the latest cuts. That facility is currently producing about one […]

Japan Airlines set out Friday to become the fourth airline in about one year to flight test a biofuel — this one mixes jatropha oil, algae and camelina (flax) and follows recent flights by Continental (last week), Air New Zealand (December ’08) and Virgin Atlantic (February ’08). The latest test was scheduled for one hour […]

The FAA has released a new letter of interpretation intended to better define “flight into known icing conditions” that, according to AOPA, “could benefit many GA pilots.” According to the FAA, while known icing conditions are “not defined by regulation,” the term has been “used in legal proceedings involving violations of FAA safety regulations.” Where […]

Full-page ads in the papers of America’s most aviation-oriented cities — Wichita, Savannah and Seattle — are attempting to draw 100 specialized engineers to the HondaJet headquarters at Piedmont Triad International Airport in Greensboro, N.C. Cessna and Boeing may be laying off, but Honda Aircraft Co. is starting to ramp up. The specific technical positions […]

American Airlines has decided that its possible failure to equip aircraft with enough emergency life rafts means that it will limit the number of passengers it carries on those aircraft until it knows exactly how many rafts it might need. That means American’s Boeing 767-300 aircraft, which are configured to hold 236 people (including crew) […]

Boeing this week bumped up its previously announced plan to cut 4,500 jobs, and will lay off a total of 10,000 workers, the company told reporters during a conference call on Wednesday. That’s about 6 percent of the company’s total workforce. Boeing blamed last year’s strike and the global recession for its losses. “The progress […]

If you were looking forward to the new NBAA Light Business Aircraft show (LBA2009) scheduled for this March in San Diego, you can still catch all of those seminars and exhibits — but they’ll be moving to the site of the regular NBAA annual convention, in Orlando, Fla., in October. NBAA, faced with today’s grim […]

Cessna has revised its SkyCatcher design with a new tail, and brought the airplane to last week’s Sport Aviation Expo in Sebring, Fla., to show to potential customers and the press. The new tail surface is bigger and more vertical, and project engineer Neal Wilford told AVweb the new design is now in flight testing […]

No, they’re not ordering in pizza, though that might be part of the FAA’s plan for the day. They’re preparing to handle the large increase in GA traffic in the Tampa Bay area for the upcoming Super Bowl, on Sunday, Feb. 1. The FAA expects that as many as 1,000 additional GA aircraft will use […]

Diamond Aircraft Industries has received EASA Type Certification for its Austro E4 turbo-diesel airplane engine, the company announced on Wednesday. The certification has been in the works for almost four years, but recently interest in the engine has intensified as Thielert, another European manufacturer of diesels for GA aircraft, encountered financial difficulties and declared bankruptcy. […]