Aircraft Upgrades

Faced with continuing delays in the development of the new Silvercrest jet engine from Safran, Dassault Aviation said on Wednesday the Falcon 5X program is cancelled. It will be replaced by a new Falcon jet with the same cross section, powered by engines from Pratt & Whitney Canada, with first deliveries in 2022. “There is […]

Rather than plunge into the development of two new clean sheet designs, it now seems like Boeing is going to spend a few years concentrating on the tried and true. Numerous industry publications are reporting that production of the 767-300 will be ramped up in response to airlines that need a 250- to 350-seat airliner […]

Expanded capabilities in Garmin’s G5 electronic flight instrument system have now been approved by the FAA and EASA, the company announced on Thursday. Owners of specific fixed-wing GA aircraft now can install the G5 in place of an existing directional gyro or horizontal situation indicator, Garmin said. In some panels, when paired with select VHF […]

When the press release on Cessna’s new twin turboprop came pixeling into my inbox Tuesday morning, my first reaction was: a new skydiving airplane! Woo-hoo! This further proves that self-interest easily overpowers rational thought, but in a more sober moment, I realized that in aviation as in everything else, history repeats. Even without a piece […]

Textron will build a new clean-sheet-design large-utility twin turboprop, and have it ready for delivery by 2020, the company announced on Tuesday. The new airplane was developed with launch customer FedEx Express, which has long depended on Cessna Caravans for its delivery fleet. The Cessna SkyCourier 408 will have almost twice the cargo space of […]

The latest model from Airbus, the A350-1000, is now certified by both the FAA and EASA, the company said on Wednesday. The airplane is a stretched version of the A350 XWB airliner. The 1000 features Rolls-Royce Trent XWB-97 engines, adding more power than earlier versions, as well as main landing gear with six wheels. The […]

Mooney has delivered the first M20U Ovation Ultra off its production line, the company announced on Thursday. In a ceremony in Kerrville, Texas, company officials turned over the keys to the new owner. The Ultra comes with a wider cabin, a newly designed leather interior, a pilot-side door, bigger windows and the Garmin G1000 NXi […]

Electric powerplants and autonomous systems continue to make progress, with reports this week of first flights and new designs. In China, the two-seat RX1E-A, an advanced version of the RX1E, designed by Shenyang Aerospace University, flew for the first time this week and proved it can now fly for up to two hours on a […]

Now that the Part 23 rules to certify airplanes have been revised, the FAA says it’s ready to take on an overhaul of the regulations for certifying helicopters. “The proposed changes are necessary to address modern designs currently used in the rotorcraft industry and would reduce the burden on applicants for certification of new rotorcraft […]

The market may be flooded with ADS-B weather receivers, but the market is also seeing a new generation of subscription-based portable SiriusXM weather receivers. The latest one comes from Garmin—the GDL51—which finally completes the weather interface on the company’s aera660 portable GPS, plus it works with the Garmin Pilot tablet app. In this video, Aviation […]