Ownership

Diamond Aircraft said one of its DA42-VI light twins recently flew for the first time using sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF, at the Bremen Airport (EDDW) in Germany. The company reports that the airplane, which is part of the training fleet of the European Flight Academy—an operation under Lufthansa Aviation Training (LAT)—flew circuits around the […]

Aircraft audio system pioneer PS Engineering is doing what a good avionics manufacturer should do to survive in the current chip-shortage supply chain, and that’s tweak an already good product to save component supply. The way we see it, the PMA450C—priced $300 less than the flagship PMA450B—is a win for dealers and customers. In an […]

A deterrent for using supplemental oxygen—especially in tight cabins—is having to deal with the hardware, including the bottle and oxygen lines strung every which way. Aithre, which has been cranking out decent portable solutions, has developed a hard-mounted system called the AVI C. I took a look at the system at AirVenture 2022 where it was […]

During routine inspections, good technicians dig deep into the airframe looking for structural cracks. And if you’re doing even a causal preflight walkaround it’s not uncommon to find cracks around cowlings, windows and fairings. None of them should be ignored. Surface cracking doesn’t usually mean a cowling or control surface will come apart, but it’s […]

GE Aerospace’s GEnx engine family has passed the 50 million flight hour milestone, the company announced last week. Of those hours, nearly 32 million came from the GEnx-1B, which entered service in 2012 and powers the Boeing 787 Dreamliner. Powering the Boeing 747-8, the GEnx-2B has logged 18 million hours since entering service in 2011. […]

When you present yourself to a designated pilot examiner (DPE) or an FAA employee for a checkride to add a new certificate or rating, both you and the aircraft are subject to closer inspection than you may be accustomed. Pilots aren’t expected to know the dry torque specification for an engine’s cylinder studs, but they […]

Speed costs money. That’s why few airplanes coming out of the factory were optimized for speed—it costs staggering sums of money to certificate a production airplane and at some point, the engineers and bean counters threw up their hands and shouted, “That’s enough!”   While the cruel realities of squared functions when it comes to speed […]

Continental Aerospace vice president for global sales and applications engineering Oliver Leber talked with AVweb at AirVenture 2023 about the FAA validated type certificate for the CD-300 engine, testing hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) on the CD-100 and some of the company’s sustainability initiatives.

Pratt & Whitney Canada announced this week at AirVenture 2023 that it has now delivered over 400 PT6 E-Series engines. Since its launch in October 2019, the engine family has logged more than 100,000 flight hours worldwide. The latest in the company’s extensive line of PT6 engines, the E-Series powers the Pilatus PC-12 NGX and […]

DeltaHawk received an FAA type certificate for its 180-HP DHK180 piston engine earlier this year. The four-cylinder, clean-sheet design was on display at AirVenture 2023 where AVweb’s Kate O’Connor took a look.