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Gulfstream’s new G650 recently reached Mach 0.995 on a test flight, which the company says establishes the business jet as the world’s fastest civil aircraft. That title that has long been held by Cessna’s Citation X, which flies at Mach 0.92. Gulfstream said the G650 achieved the maximum speed during flutter testing, when the test […]

The Avgas Coalition, which is made up of aviation industry groups and petroleum industry organizations, has told EPA more study is needed to determine whether leaded aviation fuel actually poses a risk great enough to warrant an “endangerment finding.” Such a finding would be the first step in banning lead from avgas. AOPA and the […]

Mexicana, Mexico’s largest airline, stopped flying at noon on Saturday, telling passengers still holding tickets it was sorry for the inconvenience. The airline entered bankruptcy protection earlier and was trying to reorganize when parent company Grupo Mexicana pulled the pin, citing, among other things, the inability to reach deals with unionized employees. “Financial deterioration and […]

Arizona education officials have apparently decided against following California in imposing potentially onerous financial and regulatory requirements on Part 61 flight schools. The Arizona State Board for Private Postsecondary Education unanimously rejected a proposal to consider Part 61 flight schools as “vocational” programs. Doing so would have made the generally smaller and less federally regulated […]

The Navy says it’s working on a software glitch that resulted in a helicopter drone flying autonomously toward Washington, D.C., last week. The Northrop Grumman MQ-8B Fire Scout UAV is no toy helicopter. It grosses out at 3,150 pounds and is nearly 24 feet from nose-mounted multi-sensing eye to tail rotor. On Aug. 2, while […]

British Airways is investigating how an automated message came to be played on Aug. 24 over the intercom of an otherwise healthy in-flight 747, telling all 275 passengers the jet was going to ditch. The message, delivered by what a British tabloid called a “calm female voice,” said (according to multiple other sources), “This is […]

Having most recently set its sights on late this year, Boeing is blaming Rolls-Royce for the latest in a series of delays that now has the company estimating first delivery of its 787 Dreamliner sometime in the first part of next year. Boeing says it needs Rolls-Royce’s Trent 1000 engines, an engine option for the […]

In raw figures, Cirrus had a better first quarter this year than last, but while “the trajectory of the business is terrific at the bottom line,” Cirrus CEO Brent Wouters told TheStreet.com, “the revenue line stinks” and fuel adversity may be coming. Cirrus’ first quarter was up 36 percent over the same period last year, […]

Central Maine Airport operator Kristina Wallace told The Morning Sentinel her phone is “ringing off the hook” with calls from pilots who’ve learned that 87-Octane fuel is about to vanish from the airport. Federal regulations and tax incentives, along with the actions of fuel refiners and distributors in the region, mean that the only 87-Octane […]