News

The U.S. Air Force is planning to fly a drone this summer to test technologies that will be needed for new kinds of lightweight supersonic aircraft with flexible wings, according to a news release from NASA. The drone itself, the X-56A, is subsonic, but the knowledge gained about flutter and gust suppression will be used […]

Aggressive Aviation Insurance has announced it will offer up to a total of 15 percent off light aircraft insurance for aircraft equipped with certain kinds of modern safety equipment. The company says enhanced vision systems, seatbelt airbags and whole-airframe parachutes reduce risk factors in aviation and that should be recognized on the bottom line. “We […]

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 […]