Aircraft Upgrades

The Falcon 5X, an all-new widebody business jet by Dassault Aviation, has flown for the first time, the company has announced. The flight lasted for two hours. The Safran Silvercrest engines installed on the test plane are a “preliminary version,” Dassault said. According to the company, “design issues” have delayed the engine’s development four years […]

A French company has received EASA and Canadian certification for an aftermarket exhaust system that could substantially reduce noise complaints at training airports. Epagny-based Chabord has developed exhaust systems for Cessna 150, 152 and 172 aircraft it says cut the noise from them by at least half. It has “certified silent exhaust systems” for other […]

Nextant, the Cleveland, Ohio, company that takes in older aircraft and remanufactures them with fresh upgrades, has announced a new “incremental” upgrade program for the Beech 400A/Hawker 400XP twinjet aircraft. The full conversion to an XTi costs about $3 million, the company says, a cost that “not everyone is able to justify.” Now Nextant is […]

The first Cessna Citation Longitude jet rolled out of the hangar in Wichita on Tuesday. Production of the new clean-sheet design super-midsize business jet has benefited from new manufacturing systems, the company said. “We’re incorporating a number of new and innovative fabrication and assembly techniques that will improve processes, reduce the number of parts and […]

Bell Helicopter’s 505 Jet Ranger X is now certified by the FAA, the company has announced. The aircraft, which falls into the short light-single class of helicopters, incorporates “the latest advancements in safety and aviation technology,” according to Bell CEO Mitch Snyder. Customer response from around the world has been “outstanding,” he added, with about […]

Flexible, twistable wing flaps that may improve flight efficiency were tested by NASA researchers in a recent series of flights. The Adaptive Compliant Trailing Edge tests were flown at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, based on knowledge gained from the project’s prior flight tests in 2014 and 2015. “We’re twisting the inboard […]

Both the FAA and EASA have certified the newest version of the Skyhawk, Textron announced on Tuesday. The Cessna Turbo Skyhawk JT-A features Garmin G1000 NXi avionics and the 155-HP turbodiesel Continental CD-155 engine. The maximum range of 963 nautical miles is a 50 percent increase compared to the standard Skyhawk, and maximum speed is […]

To follow up on its popular Your Refurb series, AVweb is starting a new, equally occasional, series on caring, feeding and upgrading your airplane: What’s Under the Hood? The idea is to pass along information on the components see when you open up the cowling, why they’re there, how they work and how to take […]

Lockheed Martin’s LM-100J civil freighter has completed its first flight, the company has announced. The airplane, part of the Super Hercules cargo line, will perform in a variety of roles, such as firefighting, medevac and VIP transport. It also can deliver bulk and oversize goods to hard-to-reach locations. The first flight went “flawlessly,” said Wayne […]

Regional airlines say the FAA is vastly understating the cost of a proposed AD that will require them to replace 10,482 passenger seats in various small airliners. The FAA said the AD will only cost the airlines a total of $900,000 because it is only tallying the labor cost of removing the Slim and Slimplus […]