News

As we noted at the top, this year’s NBAA convention was most certainly a success. Among other kudos, the association’s event management crew definitely deserves a few weeks in a sunny clime and serial rum drinks with little umbrellas for pulling off the change of venue in a scant two months. Just as with any […]

Adam Aircraft this week announced its first customer delivery of an A500 centerline piston twin aircraft, serial number 005, which was delivered to a Colorado Springs business executive on Monday. The delivery comes on the heels of the companys receiving FAA approval for its production inspection system, a precursor to a full-blown production certificate. Operating […]

The SSBJ — supersonic business jet — is alive and well, says Aerion Corporation Brian Barents. “We are keeping to an aggressive timeline moving toward routine supersonic business jet travel,” he said in a statement at NBAA. Announced at last year’s show, the company says its ongoing work has confirmed the aircraft’s configuration through “extensive” […]

Meanwhile, the fine folks at Eclipse Aviation might be slitting their wrists if they had only 295 orders. In fact, the company announced this week at NBAA that its order book for the Eclipse 500 VLJ now tops 2,350 aircraft. This includes 1,592 firm orders with 765 options; all 2,357 aircraft are secured with non-refundable […]

Sino Swearingen Aircraft Corporation (SSAC) announced its order book for the just-certified SJ30-2 light jet is approaching 300 and will probably exceed that mark by the time you read this. As AVweb previously reported, SSAC got most of its FAA paperwork last month. During a ceremony Wednesday, FAA Deputy Administrator Bobby Sturgell formally presented the […]

Gulfstream may soon be giving Cessna lessons in how to schedule designing and certifying business jets. In recent years, Cessna’s new-product development has produced little angst but lots of “mission accomplished” back-slapping as the company seemingly meets each and every one of its rollout, first-flight and certification goals. Now, Gulfstream has upped the ante by […]

The thing that was so exciting about the Starship was not just its all-composite construction. Instead, the whole deal was radical departure: a canard, twin pusher turboprops, tipsails instead of a conventional vertical stabilizer. By contrast, the Spectrum 33 is not at all radical from a distance. It more resembles an unnatural pairing of a […]

Earlier, we hinted at an exception to our theme that this year’s NBAA extravaganza was an evolutionary one. Enter long-time industry veteran Linden Blue. Blue, you may know, was in Beechcraft’s left seat in 1983 when the aforementioned Starship was born. He also served as general manager at Learjet and was CEO of Learfan. While […]

But what about the industry’s “visibility and success?” Where does it really stand, how does its current status stack up to earlier years? And, most important, where is it going? Those questions are always in the air at each NBAA convention and this year was not an exception. Enter Rolls-Royce, which this week released a […]

With that said, the big news at this year’s show was that the industry seems more mature than it has in recent years. For its part, NBAA used Wednesday’s opening general session to fire an opening salvo against what many are convinced will be the industry’s next big battle: user fees. “There is a growing […]