Business & Military

A helicopter tourism pilot used his Robinson R44 helicopter to scare a shark away from a calving whale along the west coast of Australia last week. Sean Blocksidge, proprietor of Wild Blue Helicopters of Margaret River, Western Australia, was on a flight with his friend and company pilot Brett Campany to do some aerial photography […]

Lockheed Martin has successfully completed a test mission involving resupply, reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition, all of it conducted completely by autonomous vehicles, the company said last week. The test, at Fort Benning, Georgia, was designed to simulate a mission to resupply soldiers defending a village. The K-Max unmanned helicopter delivered an autonomous military ground […]

Textron Aviation is closing former Cessna fractional operator CitationAir and selling the remaining airplanes. CitationAir was started in 2000 as CitationShares, a division of Cessna. Cessna stopped selling shares in new aircraft and jet cards two years ago and it’s ceasing flight operations Oct. 31. “We previously communicated with our customers regarding the decision to […]

A couple of new companies are trying fresh approaches to pull high-value business travellers out of the backpack and tennis shoe mainstream of modern air travel. La Compagnie is the latest to begin an “all business class” service to Europe. The airline has put 74 lie-flat seats two-by-two in the long narrow cabin of a […]

Eclipse Aerospace laid off “several” workers from its plant in Albuquerque last week. “I’ve had much better days,” Eclipse Aerospace Senior Vice President Ed Lundeen told Albuquerque Business First on Friday. “The bottom line is that the market has not recovered yet. We’re not seeing the sales we planned for,” he said. Lundeen told AVweb […]

The China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co. has started to build the TA600, which will be the largest amphibious aircraft in production, the company has announced. The TA600, aimed at the firefighting and rescue markets, will fly for the first time sometime in 2015, said Fu Junxu, a CAIGA executive. The airplane will be powered […]

In a legal interpretation released Aug. 13, the FAA’s Chief Counsel for Regulations ruled against “peer-to-peer general aviation flight sharing” Internet-based operations that allow private pilots to offer available space on flights they intend to take. AirPooler Inc. had asked the FAA for an interpretation of the regulations-seeking to confirm that a pilot participating in […]

AVweb’s weekly review of what’s going on in aviation turned up news that Power Flow had broken its own record for sales of Tuned Exhaust Systems at AirVenture, Oxygen to Go, LLC and its founder Dr. Brent Blue were recognized by Delta Airlines for significant contributions to persons with disabilities, the NTSB has proposed changes […]

While the FAA’s pace of integrating unmanned aerial systems into the national airspace is excruciatingly slow for drone fans, the small Himalayan country of Bhutan is moving forward. Matternet, a Silicon Valley startup with some big investors backing it, has been testing a drone delivery network there that could help transport critical medical supplies to […]

Honda Aircraft showed the first production model of its new business jet at AirVenture 2014. Honda’s Andrew Broom took AVweb through the aircraft. view on YouTube