Business & Military

A million bucks doesn’t buy what it used to, unless you’re buying five new axis machining cells, in which case it buys a lot more than it ever has. As Continental announces a major new investment in a new factory in Mobile, it will be building what we simply don’t see very often: a new, […]

Blue Origin will be the 2016 winner of the Collier Trophy “for successfully demonstrating rocket booster reusability with the New Shepard human spaceflight vehicle through five successful test flights of a single booster and engine, all of which performed powered vertical landings on Earth.” Although Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) was first to guide a boost […]

Natilus, a small company with just three employees, based in Richmond, California, is working to launch a transoceanic cargo business with airliner-size drones. They are currently building a 30-foot-long prototype that they plan to test this summer, according to their press kit. They then plan to produce a full-scale, 200-foot-long turboprop drone, built of carbon-fiber […]

The FAA banned jets from Florida’s Lantana/Palm Beach County Airport in 1973, but that ban is now lifted, the Palm Beach Post reported on Tuesday. Errol Forman, a retired Eastern Air Lines pilot, had landed his newly acquired 1983 Cessna Citation I/SP jet there in May, and a neighbor reported the violation to authorities. Forman […]

Almost as a condition of entry, people who voluntarily engage in general aviation at any level have to be slightly delusional. It takes a hearty constitution to look at gracefully declining sales numbers and eroding flight activity and think, sure, I’ll just keep on going here. I mean, what the hell? In that context, yesterday’s […]

Continental Motors will build a new plant in Mobile, Alabama, the company announced on Monday. The huge new facility, with 225,000 square feet of space, will house both corporate offices and manufacturing space, replacing 11 buildings currently in use across 44 acres at the Mobile Aeroplex. “The current operation being spread throughout multiple buildings, drives […]

The pilot of a Turbine Otter that crashed in Alaska in 2015, killing all nine aboard, had turned off the terrain awareness and warning system before the aircraft hit the side of a mountain near Ketchikan. The NTSB released the factual docket on the crash of the Promech Air crash, which occurred in marginal VFR […]

Harrison Ford was contrite and apologized to air traffic controllers at John Wayne Airport in Orange County last Feb. 13. The FAA released tapes of two radio exchanges and one phone call between Ford and John Wayne tower personnel on Friday. “I’m the schmuck who landed on the taxiway,” Ford told tower personnel in a […]

Part of my job description is to hang around people who sell airplanes, or try to. In Cessna’s salad days, the company clearly knew how to sell and it helped that the market was ready to absorb thousands of new airframes. Now, not so much. The definition of a circular argument is to ask whether […]

Embraer says its fourth E190-E2 prototype has officially joined the test team with a two-hour flight last week. The petite Brazilian twin is the most refined of the four siblings and will be used specifically for interior tests: cabin evacuation, environmental comfort and internal noise. The three aircraft already in testing have accumulated 650 flight […]