Business & Military

Early-year new aircraft shipments are down in 2016, according to the General Aviation Manufacturers Association’s latest report. For the first quarter of this year, total GA airplane shipments fell 3.7 percent compared to 2015, GAMA reported Friday (PDF).Piston aircraft remained relatively steady with 191 shipments for the first quarter of 2016, with 193 for the […]

An unmanned airplane made a successful first test of cloud-seeding operations in Nevada, adding a new kind of industrial-use experiment to one of the nation’s FAA-designated UAS test sites. The UAS, which weighs less than 55 pounds and has a wingspan under 12 feet, flew for about 18 minutes last week and reached 400 feet, […]

AVweb’s search of news in aviation found announcements from jetAVIVA, Flightdocs, Kansas State Polytechnic and the Upwind Foundation. jetAVIVAannounced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Kansas Aircraft Corporation, a highly respected aviation sales firm based in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Flightdocs Inc., global provider of aircraft maintenance tracking services, announced the release […]

The FAA will stand up a new advisory committee for the drone industry beginning sometime this summer, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said on Wednesday. Speaking at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International in New Orleans, Huerta said the committee will be modeled after a similar panel organized to funnel industry opinions into the emerging […]

A Boeing B747-400 that has been converted to an aerial firefighting tanker is ready to enter service, Global SuperTanker Services has announced. The airplane, christened Spirit of John Muir, will be based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. From there, it can be deployed at speeds up to 600 mph to reach wildfires almost anywhere in the […]

I wasn’t precisely counting, but at this year’s AUVSI event, there seemed to be more companies hawking a particular kind of software meant to integrate, analyze and order the oceans of data and imagery that all these flying eyes in the sky are pumping into various networks. And everything is tied into what’s commonly called […]

At the AUVSI show in New Orleans, a new company called SkyeIntelligence was showing a trick drone with self-following capability. You simply launch it, and it follows your every move. AVweb shot this short news video on the product. view on YouTube

Although there haven’t been many accidents involving unmanned aircraft systems, there have been enough for the NTSB to begin building the investigatory resources to determine causes, just as they have for years with manned aircraft. In this exclusive AVweb podcast recorded at the AUVSI trade show in New Orleans, the NTSB’s Bill English explains what’s […]

As the U.S. military deals with the uncertain complexities of a future dependent on and driven by robotic technologies, the soldier of the future will have unprecedented precision capabilities, but also higher expectations than soldiers of the last generation. That’s one of several observations offered by General David Perkins at Xponential 2016, the AUVSI trade […]

As Amazon bolts at breakneck speed toward package delivery by autonomous drone, it sees future air traffic control and de-confliction as a series of overlapping but collaborating apps in which aircraft and controllers share separation tasks. Amazon’s Gur Kimchi, who’s overseeing the company’s PrimeAir drone development efforts, outlined a view of the future in which […]