Business & Military

Somewhere in the not-that-distant past, the rollout of a new airliner morphed from a simple tow out of the hangar to polite applause into industrial theater with a cast of thousands. Give China’s COMAC—the government-owned consortium responsible for commercial aircraft—credit for nailing the theater part, albeit with a slight party twist not of the balloon […]

The first Chinese airplane designed for the large-airliner segment rolled out of the factory on Monday morning. The C919 jet, built by the state-run Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), can seat up to 168 passengers. COMAC said it has orders for 517 aircraft from 21 customers, most of them based in China. The jet […]

Days after throwing a $1 billion lifeline to struggling aircraft manufacturer Bombardier, the Quebec government is now asking the newly elected Justin Trudeau federal government to match the investment in one of the province’s biggest employers. The new government, which swept to power two weeks ago, will decide Wednesday whether to give the company money […]

Letter of the Week:Correcting the Imbalance Regarding Paul Bertorelli’s blog about gender imbalance: Aviation, as a profession, seems to have set the modern standard on “imbalance,” an ironic fact given the physical principles on which it is based. Does it make sense to address the subject of gender imbalance without including wage imbalance, race imbalance, […]

Flight Safety International and the City of Wichita have reached an agreement on disposition of the former Flight Safety facility, which was heavily damaged when a King Air crashed into the building. As we reported last year, four people, including three Flight Safety employees in the building, were killed when the aircraft crashed. Since then, […]

NASA will partner with the Houston Airport System (HAS) to develop one of 10 spaceports being permitted by the FAA near its home base at the Johnson Space Center. Cape Canaveral notwithstanding, NASA will partner with HAS to develop Ellington Airport into a spaceport. Spaceports, in the current definition, are airports where suborbital space flights […]

AVweb’s search of aviation news around the world turned up a major expansion for Yingling Aviation,ONE Aviation’s new Chinese distributor,and two announcements from the education front – a new aerospace event in Nevada, and K-12 grants awarded to two teachers.Yingling Aviation has announced a significant expansion to its propeller maintenance, repair and overhaul operations with […]

Watching the progress of this week’s Question of the Week, I was reminded that my attitude toward women in the workplace was pretty much crystalized all at once at 5:30 a.m. on February 10th,1969. Standing in the induction line at Fort Holabird, it occurred to me that if women were eligible for the then draft, […]

A team headed by NASA engineer Mark Moore plans to fly a modified Tecnam P2006T driven by an array of small propellers powered by electric batteries. Moore explains to AVweb’s Mary Grady how this project could completely upend the design rules for GA aircraft of the future. Duration: 5:34 File Size: 6.4 MB download here

A runaway military blimp thatfloated through part of Pennsylvania Wednesday, dragging a cable and cutting power to thousands of residents, has been secured. It’s not yet clear how the blimp escaped from its tether atAberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, butas many as 20,000 people were reported to be without electricity, according to CNN’s reporton the […]