News

It took a while — the proposed airworthiness directive was out over a year ago — but this week, the FAA issued a final rule requiring inspections and compression tests for some 8,000 engines built by Teledyne Continental Motors with cylinders by Superior Air Parts, if they have logged more than 750 flight hours. The […]

The FAA on Tuesday changed its certification standards for transport category airplanes to require either the automatic activation of ice protection systems or a method to tell pilots when they should be activated. “We’re adding another level of safety to prevent situations where pilots are either completely unaware of ice accumulation or don’t think it’s […]

Brian Morgan Mark O’Halloran Apparently undaunted by the current state of the aviation industry (see today’s GAMA story), a pair of entrepreneurs is preparing to build a 600,000-square-foot facility at the Sheboygan County (Wisc.) Airport where they will develop and manufacture a new vertical-takeoff-and-landing jet design. County leaders said the company has potential for “tremendous […]

Sales of piston aircraft dropped 58 percent in the first half of 2009, compared to the same period a year before, the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) reported in their quarterly update on Tuesday. Shipments fell from 1,034 airplanes last year to just 434 units in 2009. Business jets were also down, by 38 percent […]

When Elrey Jeppesen in 1934 created the first aeronautical chart, he probably had no idea he was founding a company that would become one of the most well-known in aviation. Since then, the technology has changed a bit, as have the charts, and the company is celebrating its 75th year of traditional charting by partnering […]

AirVenture at Oshkosh gets lots of attention for the spectacular aircraft and aviators it attracts, but in a less visible way, it’s also a place to get things done. Everybody is gathered in one place, out of their offices and in a collegial atmosphere, and plenty of meetings are scheduled where decisions are made and […]

EAA got the stars out to promote its annual “Gathering of Eagles” fundraiser at AirVenture Oshkosh last week, and they brought in bid after bid from an audience over 1,100 strong, raising a total of $1.8 million to support EAA’s Young Eagles program. Auction items included a flight in a Sikorsky Air Crane, an aerobatic […]

Grimes Manufacturing, a major producer of aircraft lights, uses a C-45H (the military version of a Beech 18) as a test bed for their lights. The aircraft was originally built for the military, and was delivered in 1944. For 20 years it moved around to different bases and was used for different missions until it […]

Groups of all kinds across the GA spectrum seem to have become convinced this year that collaboration, rather than competition, is good for everybody, and this week at AirVenture we saw a number of announcements about new relationships. One of those was between AOPA and Women in Aviation, International (WAI), who said on Thursday at […]

A 17-year-old from Yorkshire, England, met with various aviation industry executives and government officials in the U.K. recently and convinced them that he was a tycoon about to launch his own airline, when in fact he had no such plans or funding, the London Times reports. The boy used the pseudonym Adam Tait, and used […]