News

A Goodyear A-60+ blimp caught fire in Germany on Sunday evening as the pilot tried to land; the three passengers were able to leap to safety, but the pilot was killed. Witnesses said they heard a loud engine noise and smelled fuel as the blimp hovered about six feet above the ground at Reichelsheim Airfield, […]

Maynard Hill, who set 25 aviation records and whom the Washington Post called a “virtuoso of balsa and glue,” died June 7 at his home in Silver Spring, Md. Hill was a legend in the remote control model aircraft world and his exploits included some remarkable records. He flew an RC model to 26,990 feet […]

Passengers who were thankful to have lived through it and an airline captain who became an instant celebrity because of it gathered around the battered hull of Airbus A320 N106US Sunday to celebrate the aircraft that changed their lives. The dented and gashed fuselage of the aircraft used for US Airways Flight 1549 from La […]

An International Air Transport Association report suggests cellphones and other personal electronics, notably the iPad, can cause alarming disruptions to aircraft systems. The report, obtained by ABC News, is said to document 75 instances between 2003 and 2009 in which flight crews believed interference from passengers using an electronic device caused something to go wrong […]

Ash from a major volcanic eruption in Chile has cancelled hundreds of flights and stranded 25,000 passengers from neighboring Argentina to far-away New Zealand and Australia, and experts say this could be just the beginning. “It’s got a very strong satellite signal and it’s right up there with the big, big eruption clouds … it […]

Citing challenges in production design and problems with third-party suppliers, the developers of the Transition roadable aircraft have announced a delay that extends their expected first delivery date to “late 2012.” The company still plans to show, but not fly, one of two production prototypes at AirVenture Oshkosh this July and says its past experience […]

Internet chat forums have for months been alive with comments after 1970s-era F-16s were said in a Pakistani air force blog to have beaten state-of-the-art Eurofighter Typhoons in close air combat exercises, but there’s at least one problem with the story. At the core of the issue is an interview in which an unnamed alleged […]

Inventor Chris Mullin, with help from the Air Force, is developing smart sunglasses that identify the brightest spots in a wearer’s field of view, dynamically darken that specific area, and follow the light source, leaving the rest of the view less affected. The glasses work by putting liquid crystal displays in the lenses themselves. That […]

Delta Air Lines worked to rebound from negative publicity Wednesday after soldiers returning from Afghanistan aboard a Delta flight appeared in a YouTube video explaining they were charged $200 each by the airline for carrying extra bags. Part of the problem appears to be that the soldiers understood their travel orders to mean they were […]

Bird strikes are a perennial problem for aviators, but in Santa Barbara, Calif., airport managers found that improving bird habitat near the airport actually helped prevent bird-aircraft conflicts. Workers reconfigured a 10-acre wetland area to restore tidal flows. They found that the new habitat attracted small shorebirds such as sandpipers, which tend to fly in […]