Recent Updates

By law, the FAA has dropped the controversial “biographical profile” for prequalified (college program and military veteran) air traffic control trainee applicants and will hire 1,400 new trainees this year.Applications will only be taken from Aug. 8-15 at the U.S. government’s official jobs website but applicants can set up an online profile before that. In […]

AVweb‘s search of news in aviation found announcements from Cessna Pilot Centers, the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals,ELITE Simulation Solutionsand CiES.Cessna Pilot Centers’ use of the latest iPad technology gives pilots convenient access to their online courses even when they are offline. The CPC Companion app, a free download from the Apple App Store, allows […]

Moon Express, a Cape Canaveral-based private company, announced this week it has received government approval to send an autonomous lander to the moon and plans to do so next fall. The multi-agency collaboration with the company includes NASA and the FAA. The approval puts Moon Express in the lead among other contenders for the $20 […]

Airbus engineers based in Silicon Valley are working to develop “an autonomous flying vehicle platform,” called Vahana, that could provide transport for both passengers and cargo, the company has announced. Flight tests of the first vehicle prototype are slated for the end of 2017. Ultimately, the system could operate similarly to car-sharing applications, with the […]

In the eight months since the FAA opened its online drone registration system, more than 500,000 hobbyists have signed up, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said today in Washington, already outnumbering the 320,000 registered manned aircraft. Huerta said the FAA now is taking further steps to ensure the drone industry can continue to grow “at the […]

Lockheed Martin is serious about developing lighter-than-air vehicles, and now it has patented a new “spider” device that solves a maintenance problem for airship operators. Traditionally, teams of workers have been required to manually scan the airship envelope to find and repair tiny holes that couldn’t be found any other way. Now, Lockheed’s engineers have […]

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation has awarded to Virgin Galactic the operator license it needs to move forward with taxi and flight tests for SpaceShipTwo, the company announced this week. SpaceShipTwo is the passenger-carrying vehicle that ultimately will be carried to about 50,000 feet by WhiteKnightTwo. From that altitude, SpaceShipTwo will be released […]

When Los Angeles Times reporter Nigel Duara was fishing for a third-day lead on the tragic balloon crash in Texas Monday, the graph practically wrote itself: “The pilot of a hot-air balloon that crashed into a Texas pasture had four convictions for drunken driving on his record, but was not required to submit to the […]

NASA took delivery this week of a Tecnam P2006T, which will undergo transformation into an electric-propulsion testbed called the X-57 Maxwell. The Scalable Convergent Electric Propulsion Technology and Operations Research (SCEPTOR) project, the latest in NASA’s X-plane experiments, seeks to develop technologies to make flying quieter, cheaper and emissions-free. Sean Clarke, one of the leaders […]

China will soon be getting a new general aviation organization to promote industrial expansion in China. At AirVenture last week, Z-Park Sky Innovations General Aviation Alliance told reporters that the organization is aimed at helping expand GA in China, which is expected to total about $150 billion by 2020. The alliance is headquartered in Zhongguancun […]