Business & Military

Sierra Nevada Corporation has unveiled a smaller version of its Dream Chaser space plane designed to be launched to low earth airport by Paul Allen and Burt Rutan’s Stratolaunch system. The scaled version of Dream Chaser will carry three astronauts or it can be flown as a space UAS carrying cargo only. The Stratolaunch vehicle […]

The standards organization ASTM says both the European Commission and European Aviation Safety Agency have endorsed a “global initiative to modernize the way smaller airplanes are certified.” ASTM says the CS23/Part 23 Reorganization is a blueprint for the world’s aviation authorities to bring their certification standards up to date and it was unveiled at meeting […]

The Airbus A350-900 XWB, which has been in the works for about eight years, was certified by EASA on Tuesday. FAA certification will follow soon, Airbus said. The “extra-wide-body” model can carry up to 440 passengers and eight cabin crew. “The A350 XWB embodies many extra innovative technologies which make all the difference in passenger […]

After watching FAA administrator Michael Huerta interviewed on network news last night, I felt so much better. For all the administrators I’ve covered in some way, and that’s about nine, he is absolutely the most skilled at giving polished, content-free answers and he doles these out not just to us ink-stained wretches in the GA […]

The global parcel-delivery company DHL has received authorization to start regular drone delivery flights to an island in the North Sea about 7.5 miles off the coast of Germany. “This research project represents the first and only time in Europe that a flight by an unmanned aircraft will be operated outside of the pilot’s field […]

Air France pilots ended a two-week strike Sunday but did so without resolving its fight with the company. The SNPL, Air France’s main pilots union, simply gave up and flights are expected to resume in a couple of days. The pilots walked out to pressure the airline into covering pilots of its new budget carrier […]

Last week, when I was being shown around Embraer’s new U.S.-assembled A-29 Super Tucano with a group of journalists, the first thing that caught my eye was a big covered something sticking out of each wing. In an age of remote control drones and smart bombs, that couldn’t possibly be a machine gun, could it? […]

It’s gone. It was an iconic building-designed for the future of aviation, built at a time of relentless optimism in the nation’s newest technology and with a belief that the appearance of public buildings should reflect they dynamism of those who created them. Last Friday I returned my rental car to the Hertz lot at […]

Airbus celebrated the first flight of its new A320neo Thursday at its facility in Toulouse, France. Powered by a pair of Pratt & Whitney PurePower PW1100G-JM engines, the aircraft flew for 2.5 hours performing initial system checks and began the process of expanding the flight and performance envelope, reaching a maximum altitude of 26,500 feet. […]

AVweb’s weekly search of the latest developments in aviation uncovered news of the all-electric Sun Flyer’s flight tests, Sporty’s new ATP training course, two new vice presidents at Cirrus and a free trial of Aspen Avionics’s synthetic vision product.SunAero Electric Aircraft Corp. has entered the next phase of development for its high tech solar-electric training […]