News

Hawker Beechcraft has issued layoff notices to 350 employees, the Wichita Eagle reported on Tuesday. The company, which has been struggling with more than $2 billion in debt, said in a letter to employees (PDF) that “market conditions are requiring us to adjust our overall production cadence to help ensure the company will compete effectively […]

A bill filed in the House last week aims to extend the FAA’s new airline fatigue rules to cover cargo pilots, but the effort is already drawing opposition from the cargo industry. The new FAA rules, scheduled to take effect in January 2014, stipulate that pilots must get at least 10 hours of off-duty time […]

The team working to build a prototype of the Synergy aircraft design announced recently they would seek support via the crowd-funding source Kickstarter, but this week, designer John McGinnis said that effort has stalled. “For reasons that do not make any sense to us, Kickstarter has declined our project,” his team posted on Facebook this […]

Aerion Corp., which has been working to bring a supersonic business jet to market, is preparing to launch another series of supersonic flight tests this summer, the company said last week. Designers are fabricating a device representative of the Aerion wing, with a 40-inch vertical span and an 80-inch chord, which will fly in the […]

ULPower, a company based in Geluveld, Belgium, showed off its new six-cylinder powerplants at Aero Friedrichshafen last week. UL is becoming more known in the kit airplane and experimental markets for its low-power four-cylinder engines. As Patrick Denorme explains in this AVweb video, it’s now taking a run at the higher-power six-cylinder market. UL showed […]

Although they’re improving rapidly, the chief problem with electric aircraft remains endurance due to limitations on battery capacity and weight. At Aero Friedrichshafen last week, a German company called PC-Aero showed off the latest iteration of its approach to solve the endurance problem — solar assisted flight. In this video, PC-Aero’s Calin Gologan showed AVweb […]

Before we pack up and head home from Aero 2012 in Friedrichshafen, Germany, here’s one last photo gallery showcasing some of the gyros we took in during the show. This image gallery requires JavaScript. Agri Gyro [ original size ] Agri Gyro Detail [ original size ] Apollo Gyro [ original size ] Apollo Gyro […]

American Airlines’ major unions are trying to steer the bankrupt company toward a merger with US Airways. The unions said Friday they’re reached a deal with US Airways over the structure of such a merger, one that protects some jobs and creates an airline capable of competing with United, which recently merged with Continental, and […]

The powerful Senate Appropriations Committee has rapped the knuckles of the FAA over its handling of proposed changes to the delivery of online navigation information services and suggested more congressional oversight on the implementation of those changes. The committee, whose report must be approved by the full Senate and House, says AeroNav, the arm of […]

Harrington Bishop, 64, former safety inspector at Teterboro Flight Standards District Office, was sentenced Wednesday to one year of prison time for accepting unauthorized payments from pilots after giving them check rides. Bishop, also a former Air Force pilot, was not authorized to grant licenses or participate in checks on his days off. But over […]