Recent Updates

Ten thousand airplanes is an impressive benchmark for any manufacturer, but when those airplanes are built one at a time in hangars and garages around the world, by amateurs, it’s even more of an accomplishment. Van’s Aircraft, based in Aurora, Oregon, said on Friday the RV-7 built by David Porter, who recently reported his first […]

SpaceX will launch its first Falcon Heavy rocket early in the new year and founder Elon Musk is betting the eternal resting place of his personal cherry-red Tesla Roadster on the successful outcome of the test flight. His daily driver will be the payload on the rocket, SpaceX’s most powerful to date, and if all […]

Pipistrel founder Ivo Boscarol has partnered with a Chinese company to build its Alpha Electro electric trainer and the hybrid version of the Panthera high-performance aircraft in a new aviation development near Nanjing. Pipistrel will retain 51 percent of Pipistrel Asia Pacific General Aviation Technology Ltd. The minority partner is Danny Wu Hao who, as […]

There are many ways to ground an airplane and ramp attendants at what sounds like a U.S. airport (based on the profanity-laced epithets from one of the ground crew members) found a novel approach. The incident appears to have happened in late September or early October and involves a Turkish Airlines A330 at the gate. […]

Premier Aircraft Sales is a well-known broker and mod house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the company’s latest project is called the Premier Edition Dakota. It’s a spinner-to-tail refurbishment of the Piper Dakota, a real favorite among aircraft owners and buyers who want to carry a lot more than a standard Cherokee can haul and […]

Lt. Col. Jason Heard, the commanding officer of the Air Force Thunderbirds, was removed from his post last week by Brig. Gen. Jeannie Leavitt, commander of the 57th Wing. Heard’s tenure with the U.S. Air Force Air Demonstration Squadron was marred by a crash earlier this year in which a pilot providing a demonstration ride […]

The U.S. Air Force has grounded its fleet of T-6 Texan II turboprops at Vance Air Force Base after a string of four hypoxia-like incidents in two weeks, according to the public affairs office of the 71st Flying Training Wing. This year has been a challenge for the U.S. military’s fighter community on the hypoxia […]

AVweb readers have good-naturedly borne with us the past few weeks as we’ve tweaked and modified to make AVwebFlash mobile optimized. Many of you are accessing most, if not all, of your daily information on your mobile devices, and we felt AVweb needed to keep up with the times. This process resulted in a fragmented, […]

Eight general aviation advocacy groups signed onto a letter this week protesting a bill now in the House that would put a cap on payments to veterans in flight-training programs. Other education tracks are not subject to caps, the advocates said. “Capping funds available for flight-training degree programs virtually guarantees that veterans seeking to use […]

When the press release on Cessna’s new twin turboprop came pixeling into my inbox Tuesday morning, my first reaction was: a new skydiving airplane! Woo-hoo! This further proves that self-interest easily overpowers rational thought, but in a more sober moment, I realized that in aviation as in everything else, history repeats. Even without a piece […]