News

Diamond Aircraft is furloughing 180 of its 684 employees in London, Ont., to balance inventory as weakening demand settles over the light aircraft market. But company CEO Peter Maurer told AVweb in a podcast interview that he hopes the furloughs will be short-lived as the new Lycoming-powered DA42 twin goes into production. He said there […]

Authorities in Alabama are looking for the pilot of a Piper Malibu that crashed in Florida after the pilot apparently made a fake distress call, put the aircraft on autopilot and parachuted out late Sunday. The plane went on to crash near East Milton on the Florida panhandle while the pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, […]

Cirrus Design will announce a series of model changes for 2009 today, including certified flight into known icing for the SR22. A news conference is scheduled for 10 a.m. Central time in which the company will unveil details of the FIKI system, which will be an enhancement of the current TKS set-up now available. There’s […]

Garmin has issued an update for certain handheld GPS units to fix a problem with access to the XM weather option. The 4.60 upgrade is aimed at upgrading “XM data validation for XM subscribers with weather data only.” Over New Year’s hundreds of Garmin XM subscribers lost weather capability and it was several days before […]

Two passengers noticed last week at a security checkpoint at Port Columbus that an airline pilot they passed nearby smelled strongly of alcohol, so they told a TSA agent … but they didn’t stop there. According to the Columbus Dispatch,as the men proceeded beyond the checkpoint, they noticed that the pilot was heading toward their […]

In a letter obtained by Dow Jones Newswire, aviation groups are seeking funds to launch NextGen and equip aircraft with ADS-B equipment. The letter outlines how a $4 billion cash infusion could be used to ignite NextGen air traffic control infrastructure modernization and create 77,000 jobs while obliterating previous completion date estimates. “Significant benefits that […]

Six cadets from China Eastern Airlines and Xiamen Airlines last month completed work at Boeing’s training arm, Alteon, in Brisbane, in a Multi-Crew Pilot licensing program (MPL) that aims to revolutionize and streamline airline cockpit crew training to answer the forecast demand for pilots. Boeing and Airbus together currently have a backlog of more than […]

AVwebBiz Wednesday reported that following a December announcement that Cessna would cut 500 workers, Cessna CEO Jack Pelton rang in the New Year with a Jan. 6 e-mail to employees that announced the possibility of still more layoffs. The number of jobs affected is yet to be determined. “As soon as we finalize our revised […]

It has nothing to do with the economy, according to 70-something-year-old owner Armand Rivard, it’s just “time to go fishing.” The company, which once employed about 200 people in Maine and Fort Pierce, Fla., and reached peak production of about 100 aircraft per year in the mid 1980’s, now retains four people in Kissimmee and […]

Superior Air Parts, which has filed motions for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, now expects to obtain court approval of the bidding process by Jan. 15 as Avco (a subsidiary of Textron) sits poised to compete with offers above its own $11.5 million cash bid for “substantially all of Superior’s assets.” That bid is free of all […]