Business & Military

Swift Fuels announced that it has suspended its work activities with the FAA’s Piston Alternative Fuels Initiative (PAFI) unleaded 100LL replacement fuels program on Wednesday. The company says that it is now focusing on testing a high-octane unleaded avgas replacement that is not part of PAFI and working privately with the FAA and OEMs to […]

Swift Fuel’s announcement that it’s bailing out of the FAA’s troubled Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative had an inevitability about it. Following the FAA’s announcement in June that it was suspending work on finding suitable unleaded replacements for 100LL, a not-that-subtle whiff of a certain metaphor related to chairs on the deck of a doomed ocean […]

I was doing traffic pattern work in a Citabria on a Friday afternoon at a busy, towered, Class D airport. Meanwhile, the business jet traffic was picking up, and the tower controller was doing an admirable job working our touch and goes in between the jet arrivals and departures. Lear123 (just departed): KXYZ Tower, be […]

Engineers from NASA and Boeing have successfully used “shape memory alloys” to fold a full-sized wing section from an F/A-18 Hornet jet, NASA has reported. The technology enabled the team to fold the wing section in the lab 90 degrees, with very precise control enabling them to select any position within that sweep. The ability […]

California-based SkyRyse announced the launch of a new emergency response service using semi-autonomous aircraft and introduced its advanced pilot assistance system (APAS) on Tuesday. According to the company, APAS automates, adapts and enhances control systems on compatible aircraft by using artificial intelligence, a camera and sensor suite, and decision-making algorithms. For the immediate future, a […]

Lake Aircraft has gone up for sale before, several times, but this week the company announced it’s trying again to find a new owner for its assets, including the only FAA-certified single-engine amphibious airplane on the market. The offering includes all the intellectual property and equipment needed to manufacture the Lake Renegade, Seafury and Seawolf […]

American Red Bull Air Race pilot Mike Goulian now leads the overall standings in the series after a second-place finish in Kazan, Russia, on Sunday. Goulian trailed the Czech Republic’s Martin Sonka by .115 seconds in the final round and edged fellow American Kirby Chambliss by .066 seconds. It was Goulian’s fourth top-three finish in […]

Burning Man, the massive art and culture festival in the Nevada desert, has always had an aviation angle (including an airport with a tower staffed by ATC volunteers) but the ostentatious gathering of dissimilar minds took that to a new level this year. The fuselage of a Boeing 747, minus the empennage, was towed to […]

The powerful radio control aircraft lobby is squaring off against the FAA, Department of Defense and some members of Congress over the future of their hobby, and the government departments may be outgunned politically. At issue is the so-called Rule 336 that essentially exempts those flying model planes for “hobby and recreation” from the long […]

Airbus’ Perlan II glider shattered its own altitude record Sunday, reaching 62,473 feet over the mountains of Patagonia in southern Argentina. The massive sailplane touched down at about 2:40 p.m. local time after a 5.5-hour flight riding the mountain waves that blow through the area of El Calafate Airport in the wildly beautiful area in […]