News

Is there anyone on the planet who hasn’t heard of the Virgin brand? Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records, Virgin Holidays and even space tourism through Virgin Galactic. Now comes yet another Virgin spin off, an air charter company that will trade on the same basic brand. The company is still in the Beta stage, having launched […]

A U.S.-registered Gulfstream II, with a history of alleged links to the transport of terror suspects to Guantanomo Bay, crashed in Cancun on Monday and rescuers found four tons of cocaine on board. Mexican officials aren’t saying much about the crash, including whether there were any casualties or arrests, but the Tacoma News Tribune says […]

As India continues its transformation into a world economic power, the societal changes it is undergoing are of consuming interest to a country that still relies on ancient methods of doing things in many sectors. So, for the second year, the Economic Times has hosted a conference called The Dialogue On Luxury, and there really […]

A leading aviation analyst says he’s skeptical about the structure of a buyout plan that Sino Swearingen says will finally get the speedy SJ30 to market. After a decade of majority ownership and $600 million invested by the Taiwanese government, a partnership between ACQ Capital and Action Aviation has taken over the company but Richard […]

Hawker Beechcraft CEO Jim Schuster says the former Raytheon business aircraft unit has been given a will to live under its new owners Goldman Sachs and Canadian-based Onex Corp. “This was not a business that Raytheon saw as a core,” Schuster told the Canadian newspaper, the National Post. “The objective of Raytheon was to get […]

With a unanimous vote, the city council of Jacksonville, Fla., last week overturned its ban on working on airplanes in residential areas. Milford Shirley, president of the local EAA chapter, said he was “absolutely happy” with the decision. The EAA chapter had been fighting the ban since it was imposed over a year ago, after […]

The FAA said on Tuesday it wants all aircraft flying in controlled airspace to have satellite-based avionics by 2020, so air traffic controllers can track them using Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B). The agency issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (PDF) that says the equipment will allow controllers to handle more traffic more safely with […]

The accident rate for U.S. airlines has dropped by 65 percent in the last 10 years, according to a Sunday New York Times story by aviation reporter Matthew Wald. The White House set a goal in 1997 to reduce the rate by 80 percent over 10 years, Wald wrote. Although the decline has fallen short […]

In the promotional poker game of which is faster, the Columbia 400 or the Mooney Acclaim, Mooney says it has just upped the ante. It announced this week that it has done some aerodynamic tweaks on the Acclaim which will give it a top speed of a blistering 242 knots, 5 knots faster than its […]

There is little doubt that the throaty groan of a Rolls Royce Merlin engine powering a restored example of the sexy P-51 Mustang is a unique and unmistakable sound. The only thing that could possibly be more arousing to a warbird fan than that sound might be the sound of 20 P-51s in a history […]