Recent Updates

I was happily plugging along at a good pace on my GlaStar project when life happened. What I had projected to be a two- or three-year build came to a crawl with a few spurts of activity and then finally stopped altogether. For seven years. My project was in the attached two-car garage, only a […]

Urban air mobility (UAM) company Archer Aviation officially unveiled the production version of its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) design on Thursday. Called Midnight, the aircraft is an “evolution” of the company’s Maker eVTOL, which completed its first hover flight in December 2021. Archer is targeting late 2024 for FAA certification of the Midnight […]

Groupe ADP, Skyports and Volocopter have officially opened a vertiport terminal testbed designed to explore urban air mobility (UAM) technology and passenger processes. Located at France’s Pontoise-Cormeilles airfield, the Re.Invent Air Mobility testbed facility is being called “Europe’s first fully integrated vertiport terminal for the [UAM] industry.” The launch event included a crewed test flight […]

The X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle (OTV) set a new endurance record on Saturday, landing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after spending 908 days in orbit. The uncrewed flight was the sixth for the Boeing-built vehicle, which has now traveled over 1.3 billion miles and logged 3,774 days in space. According to Boeing, the mission hosted […]

Considerable insights can be gained by examining aircraft accident statistics. But sometimes—well, the results aren’t earth-shattering, but can be interesting nonetheless. Take the issue of pilot experience. We would certainly expect more-experienced pilots to make fewer mistakes. But what’s the actual difference? It’s not something that’s only relevant to homebuilts. But my Experimental/Amateur-Built aircraft accident database […]

The FAA has published airworthiness criteria for the Joby eVTOL aircraft, making it likely to be the first to be certified. The agency put the proposed “Special Class Airworthiness Criteria” rule in the Federal Register and opened it up for a 30-day comment period. The document runs about 12 pages and covers dozens of standards […]

Lockheed Martin subsidiary Sikorsky and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) have completed their first demonstration for the U.S. Army of logistics and rescue missions using an uncrewed “optionally piloted” Black Hawk helicopter. The demonstration simulated missions including an 83-mile autonomous medical resupply carrying 400 units of real and simulated blood, delivery of a […]

Among the many effects of the supply chain problems in the summer of 2022, aviation discovered that it was having a difficult time functioning without a simple commodity—the oil filter. Lycoming and Continental engines everywhere needed spin-on, disposable oil filters to keep flying, and the supply was extremely limited. KITPLANES research found that Champion had […]

Airplanes are designed for particular missions. Some are simple ultralights designed to lift you off the ground for a few minutes in the golden hour of evening light. Some are fast performance cruisers intended to whisk you and your baggage across the country in short periods of time. Others are designed to ring out your […]

The NASA SpaceX Crew-5 mission docked with the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday evening, beginning a six-month stay for NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina. The mission, which used SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, Endurance, launched from the […]