Ownership

When I was researching last weeks story on aircraft refurb business, I heard all kinds of comments, but everyone-well, almost everyone-agreed that new aircraft prices have made flying unreachable for all but the very wealthy. When someone of the stature of Jack Pelton flatout calls airplane prices exorbitant, you have a five-alarm fire. And by […]

Heres a familiar scenario: An owner steps up to a twin or a high-performance single thats equipped with an older radar system. Unwilling to spend the money and effort to fix it or replace it, they pay to have the system removed. Sadly, many of these owners dont recognize the benefits of ships radar. The […]

The first all-new Eclipse 550 twin-engine jet to roll off the production line in Albuquerque will be on display at the 2013 NBAA convention in Las Vegas next month, Eclipse Aerospace announced on Tuesday. CEO Mason Holland said the jet represents an “amazing accomplishment” for the company, which bought up the remnants of the original […]

Owning an airplane requires a certain suspension of the economic rules that govern normal people, but on the whole, the airplane industry operates under an even more perverse logic: As sales soften, it raises unit prices, perhaps chasing away those buyers on the margins who might have been toying with pulling the trigger to buy […]

The FAA has committed $40 million to support research into alternative jet fuels and new aircraft technology at 14 universities around the country, from Boston to Honolulu, the agency announced on Friday. Research and development efforts will focus on NextGen environmental goals for noise, air quality and fuel savings. FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said the […]

On Friday, Swift Fuels hosted an unveiling in West Lafayette, Ind., for two new fuel facilities — a pilot plant and a fuel-blending site — to help produce a new aviation fuel as an alternative to 100LL. The company said it is investing $2.5 million in the two projects. “Swift Fuels’ 100SF was developed to […]

Years ago in a sleepy college aircraft economics class, welearned the pecking order of items to consider when acquiringan aircraft. The short list included the usual items of damage history,engine time, avionics, operating costs and a variety of other factorsmaking obvious sense. But one aspect of aircraft acquisition wewerent taught is an issue thats gained […]

Letter of the Week:Factoring Human Factors I was interested in the article on the KSN770 published in the Sept. 13 AVwebFlash, in which it states that “graybeards may still prefer [to use] a transfer key” as opposed to using touchscreen controls. I’m not a graybeard (is there a politically-correct term for female pilots, too?), but […]

One of the largest orders Cessna has ever recorded was placed at Moscow’s JetExpo 2013 for 79 of the manufacturer’s Skyhawks (more than half the number of Skyhawks delivered in all of 2012), purchased by Moscow-based operator ViraZH. ViraZH plans to establish the aircraft as trainers and will place them at flight schools throughout western […]

Bendix/King designed the hardware and Aspen Avionics completed the user interface for the KSN770 FMS. The end result is a powerful retrofit GPS navigator that has a sharp screen, liberal interface potential and a $13,995 price tag. Aviation Consumer‘s Larry Anglisano flew with the system to have a look. view on YouTube