Recent Updates

Beechcraft’s King Air twin turboprop has long been popular, with more than 3,000 built since the 1960s, but that doesn’t make it invulnerable to market forces — and a weak international market has driven down deliveries in the first quarter of this year to just 12, compared to 26 in the same period last year, […]

You’ve probably heard the term “silo’d” as management consultant-speak for an organization that operates with multiple independent entities that don’t talk to each other. At AVweb, we don’t quite fit that definition but we have a certain intentional insularity. Thus, over the weekend, when I saw early Saturday morning the story of yet another airline […]

A new vehicle revealed on Monday by Kitty Hawk Corp., the aircraft company led by CEO Sebastian Thrun, takes off and lands on water and qualifies for sale as an ultralight, the company said. “Your flying dreams will never be the same,” says the company website. “The Kitty Hawk Flyer is a new, all-electric aircraft. […]

Lilium Aviation, of Munich, says it has flown a prototype of its all-electric VTOL tilt-engine aircraft that the company says will fly 160 knots in horizontal thrust configuration with a range of 180 miles. A video provided by the company of the first flight shows the aircraft, with what looks like a spacious automotive-style cabin, […]

Uber has attracted dozens of speakers from the aviation industry, government and technology sectors to a large summit on “urban air transportation” in Dallas this week. The Uber Elevate Summit kicks off Tuesday and features speeches and panel discussions on the promise and problems of having fleets of electric VTOL aircraft buzzing around major cities. […]

Humans love to look for stuff and, in fact, can’t seem to stop once started. The quest for the next bright shiny object is probably coded into our DNA, a vestige from some primeval organism that slithered out of the muck not yet sentient enough to feel the burning need to fly airplanes, but just […]

Wright Electric, a San Los Obispo-based startup, aims to make every short commercial flight electric within 20 years by building what co-founder Jeff Engler calls their “electric 737.” Wright’s vision is a 150-seat, short-haul aircraft capable of serving routes under 300 miles. Engler told attendees at the Sustainable Aviation Symposium that Wright was inspired to […]

At the Sustainable Aviation Symposium, AVweb spoke with Pipistrel’s modest Director of Research and Development, Tine Tomažič. Dr. Tomažič received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ljubljana and has been with Pipistrel for 16 years as an intern, test pilot and engineer. We spoke with Tine about what electric aircraft can (and […]

In the last few editions of Wind Tunnel, we looked at how changes to the surface of an airplane’s skin can affect the aerodynamic performance of the airplane. We have seen that judicious use of tape to seal and smooth the skin can significantly reduce drag, and that ice, even in relatively small amounts, can […]

The first airline customer for Aireon’s space-based ADS-B tracking services will be Malaysian Airlines, Aireon reported in a press release issued this week. Aireon is placing ADS-B receivers on Iridium NEXT low earth orbit communications satellites, which will receive location reports from ADS-B Out equipped aircraft and relay that position to end users through Aireon […]