Business & Military

The newest version of ForeFlight’s electronic flight bag software will include advanced fuel and performance planning tools for an additional $100 per year ($200 per year over the basic subscription price). Tyson Weihs, ForeFlight co-founder and CEO, said, “The new performance product that we’re launching delivers high performance flight planning for high performance airplanes.” The […]

Paul Allen’s ambitious, fixed-wing satellite launch platform, the Stratolaunch, rolled out of its hangar Wednesday to begin ground and taxi testing. The colossal twin-fuselage aircraft, built by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, is projected to be—by wingspan—the largest aircraft to have ever taken flight, at 385 feet wide. The prototype has a 500,000-pound empty weight, a […]

The NTSB this week released a preliminary report on the fatal Learjet crash in Teterboro two weeks ago, in which two pilots were killed. While approaching the airport, the crew started to turn toward the assigned runway later than usual, the safety board said. The airplane didn’t start to turn until it was less than […]

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 […]

A high-tech airship is under construction in a Silicon Valley hangar, according to a recent report in the Guardian, and it will likely be more than 650 feet from nose to tail. “It’s going to be massive on a grand scale,” one source told the paper, though that would still be smaller than classic airships […]

A member of the U.S. Navy’s skydiving team, the Leap Frogs, died on Sunday afternoon after his parachute malfunctioned during a Fleet Week airshow in Jersey City, N.J., the Navy has confirmed. The skydiver, whose name has not been released, landed in the Hudson River and was immediately retrieved by U.S. Coast Guard members who […]

I suppose as analogies go, using fruit and baked goods is as good as any to describe the state of the general aviation market. A decade ago, it was sugar plums. Now it’s pies or, to be more accurate, pie in the singular. About 2005 or so, but definitely by 2007, every GA manufacturer of […]

John Travolta is hanging up his four-barred Qantas uniform and donating his personal Boeing 707 to an Australian museum, which will restore it. Travolta said he plans to personally deliver the Boeing to the Historic Aircraft Restoration Society (HARS) in Illawarra, New South Wales, after some maintenance on the aircraft. Travolta discussed the possibility of […]

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly says he “might” ban laptops in the passenger cabins of all international flights to and from the U.S. In an interview Sunday he said airliners with lots of Americans aboard are a prime target for terrorists and the ban wouldn’t be a response to a specific threat, but a general […]

Russia’s newest airliner took its first flight Sunday with little fanfare but a reportedly substantial order book. The Irkut MC-21-300 will compete directly with the Boeing 737 MAX, Airbus A320 Neo and Bombardier CSeries for the increasingly crowded single-aisle airliner market. It will carry 163 to 211 passengers and is projected to be 12 to […]