Business & Military

Aviation Innovators: Craig Barnett, Scheme Designers

As part of AVweb’s series on aviation innovators, we spoke with Craig Barnett, who created the company, Scheme Designers. For nearly 20 years, Craig and Scheme Designers, have been creating unique paint schemes (and, more recently, vinyl designs) for aircraft. There are now more than 11,500 airplanes flying throughout the world with paint and vinyl […]

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Truck Rams Mooney At Van Nuys

A 45-year-old man has been charged with two counts of felony vandalism and one of trespassing on an airfield after a pickup truck drove through a locked gate at Van Nuys Airport and rammed a Mooney parked on the ramp. In a statement, Van Nuys Airport spokesman Diana Sanchez said the incident occurred about 10:30 […]

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FAA May Not Require Cirrus Jet Chute Test

The FAA is proposing that Cirrus’ new SF50 Vision be able to skip airborne testing of the whole-plane parachute as part of its certification. In a Notice of Proposed Special Conditions issued March 18, the agency says that since the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) is a “supplemental” safety system on the SF50 and not […]

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Virgin, Boom Partner To Build Supersonic Airliner

A supersonic passenger jet inspired by the Concorde is under development in Colorado as a partnership between startup firm Boom and Virgin Galactic’s manufacturing arm, The Spaceship Company. Boom, founded by former Amazon executive and pilot Blake Scholl, wants to build a jet that can make a 3.4-hour round-trip flight from New York to London […]

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New This Week

AVweb‘s search of news in aviation found announcements from the National Air Transportation Association, Air Orlando Sales, Bell Helicopter and Women in Aviation International.The National Air Transportation Associationannounced the rollout of new Student and College Chapter membership programsdedicated to providing students with resources, access to experts in the field and networking opportunities that will benefit […]

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Parachutes vs. Robot Airplanes

As the inevitable autonomy of everything looms just ahead, rock-star entrepreneur Elon Musk had this to say at a recent development conference: “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine. It’s too dangerous.” And that’s to say the driverless car visionaries don’t just want to offer you an autonomous vehicle, they’ll insist on […]

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Cirrus CAPS: Checking the Score

With more than 6300 CAPS-equipped Cirrus aircraft out there and given all the unblinking security cameras running 24/7, it was inevitable that good video of a Cirrus parachute touchdown would eventually emerge. Earlier this month,it did. (More here.) On March 5, an SR22 en route from Groton, Connecticut, to Republic Airport on Long Island suffered […]

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NASA: ADS-B Could Allow Drones In NAS

Large-scale drones could safely fly in the National Airspace System by using ADS-B technology, according to NASA researchers. The agency said recently it has developed a patent-pending integrated communications and control system that’s capable of collision warnings as well as real-time traffic and weather updates. Vigilant Aerospace Systems has recently signed a licensing agreement with […]

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Airlander Ready For Launch

Assembly of the unique Airlander lighter-than-air transport vehicle is now complete, Hybrid Air Vehicles announced today. The ship was shown off to visitors, fully inflated and hovering, inside the hangar in Bedfordshire, U.K. The next step will be a ground-testing phase, then it will roll out of the hangar to start an extensive flight-test program. […]

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Kit Crash Kills Seven

The CEO of the world’s biggest iron ore company was killed, along with his family and a hired pilot, in the crash of his kit-built aircraft in Sao Paolo, Brazil, on Saturday. Roger Agnelli, his wife, two grown children and their spouses died when their Comp Air 9 turboprop, which is a homebuilt aircraft in […]

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