Recent Updates

Stratolaunch, the massive airplane that is being built by Scaled Composites to deliver satellites to low Earth orbit, successfully ran all six of its Pratt & Whitney turbofan engines for the first time this week, the company has announced. The PW4056 engines, which previously powered a Boeing 747, support a payload capacity of more than […]

I got an email this week from a reader on the cusp of making a small fleet purchase for a few flight schools. I was asked for an opinion on the various choices in the training market. The more you think about this, the more difficult the decision actually is. There’s simply no perfect airplane […]

Spike Aerospace, one of a handful of companies working to bring back supersonic civilian flight, said on Wednesday they will fly their first SX-1.2 demonstrator aircraft by the end of this month. The scaled, proof-of-concept unmanned aircraft will help validate the aerodynamics of the planned S-512 supersonic jet, the company said. “We’re very excited to […]

United Airlines will say goodbye to the Boeing 747 Nov. 7 with a special flight to Hawaii that commemorates its first use of the airliner in commercial service. The flight sold out within hours on Tuesday. The last scheduled United 747 revenue flight will be from Seoul to SFO on Oct. 29. United’s first aircraft […]

Pratt & Whitney has completed testing on a proof of concept adaptive bypass variant of the F135 fighter engine. The adaptive three-stream fan test was completed as part of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory’s Adaptive Engine Technology Development (AETD) program at Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma, Tennessee. Modern jet engines utilize two flow […]

Anyone who knows anything about aviation also knows at least two things about regulations: They’re written in blood and despite the belief that the FAA devises rules on a whim, the so-called tombstone mentality lives on. The bodies come before the rules, usually, and sometimes it takes a while. But unless we’re reminded of it […]

The highly modified P-51 Strega flown by James Consalvi edged longtime rival Steve Hinton Jr. in Voodoo, another Mustang, in the gold unlimited class final at the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada, on Sunday, reclaiming the title and spoiling the Voodoo team’s swan song race. Strega covered the 62.8114 miles (eight laps of […]

Steve Hinton Jr. set a record for the fastest speed recorded by a piston-powered aircraft over four 3-kilometer runs in early September and he spoke with AVweb’s Russ Niles at the National Championship Air Races about how that kind of flying compares to pylon racing at Reno. view on YouTube

Danny Clisham has been calling the World Championship Air Races in Reno for more than 35 years and he’s as excited about them now as he was when he started. Clisham says a new generation of race pilots will continue the tradition of using the latest technology to squeeze ever more speed out of machines […]

Horizon Air says it can no longer fly to Colorado Springs from Seattle because it doesn’t have enough pilots. The airline, cancelled 6 percent of its flights in June because of its pilot shortage but this might be the first time a route has been abandoned because of it. Horizon says it faces a pilot […]