News

Kent Couch, owner of the Stop and Go Mini-Mart in Bend, Ore., on Saturday strapped himself into lawn chair with 105 balloons, four-foot-round multi-colored balloons, hoping to fly all the way to Idaho. His onboard equipment included an altimeter, handheld GPS, two-way radio, camcorder and cellphone. Couch’s flying lawn chair also sported four gallon-size plastic […]

Cessna Aircraft on Tuesday greenlighted its light sport aircraft (LSA) program and said it plans to unveil a full-scale mock-up and program details at EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wis., later this month. (Watch AVweb’s Cessna LSA video from Sun ‘n Fun.) The move to commit to the project comes just shy of a year after […]

Epic Aircraft CEO Rick Schrameck confirmed to AVweb that the company’s very light jet (VLJ) single, dubbed Victory, made its maiden flight on Friday at 7:30 a.m. from the Redmond (Ore.) Airport. The Friday morning flight lasted about 50 minutes, during which time Epic test pilot Len Fox flew the Williams FJ33-4A-powered airplane with the […]

A pilot of a Cessna Citation 550 carrying an organ transplant team that crashed in Lake Michigan in early June reported to air traffic control that the aircraft had runaway trim, as AVweb previously reported. An investigation update from the NTSB says a pilot is also heard telling the other pilot to take the controls […]

The Sheriffs office in Butte County, Calif., is investigating an impromptu Fourth of July air show that reportedly scared people tubing on the Sacramento River and resulted in a small aircraft being forced to land on a gravel bar after pursuit by a police helicopter. According to the Chico Enterprise-Record, Sgt. Dave Lilygren of the […]

Oakland, Calif., pilot Quincey Carr might yet achieve many of his dreams after going through a nightmare for the past year. Carr, 22, was getting his hair cut last Aug. 11 when, for no apparent reason, a man shot him five times as he sat in the barber chair. At the time, Carr had paid […]

Ron Taylor has been out of work in his chosen field for almost 26 years, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to take the first offer that comes along. Taylor, the president of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) whose members were fired en masse by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 when they went […]

The Air Force is putting $6 million into a Brown University project thats trying to apply the amazing flight capabilities of bats to agile stealthy unmanned aircraft. The team of researchers speculates that bats are wired for flight with an array of sensors on their highly flexible wings that allows them to perform maneuvers that […]

Think you have the airplane/flying car of the future ready to show its stuff? There could be $250,000 in prize money waiting for you in the first annual Personal Air Vehicle Challenge. The CAF Foundation, a group of homebuilders that evolved into an organization promoting the flying-car concept, is organizing the event and its funded […]

According to the FAA, 4.5 miles is the new five miles. USA Today reported last week the agency has adopted new reporting standards for air traffic separation errors that, among other things, give controllers a 10-percent margin for error in maintaining the once-sacrosanct five-mile spacing. The newspaper paraphrases Tony Ferrante, director of the FAA’s Air […]