Recent Updates

Regardless of whether your aircraft is metal, composite, or tube and fabric, quite a few homebuilts these days use composite fairings. Nowhere is this more true than the engine cowl—it’s just not an easy shape to fabricate out of other materials. Unfortunately, for tightly-cowled installations, heat from proximity to exhaust pipes (or a turbo) can […]

AVweb’s search of aviation news around the world found announcements from Vector Aerospace, McKinney Air Center,LifeStyle Aviation and Flightglobal. Vector Aerospace Corporation, a global independent provider of aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) services, announced the grand opening of a new engine test cell at its Summerside facility in Prince Edward Island, Canada. It joins […]

Wrapping up a marathon 10 days of travel this week, I was happy to get my mitts on and actually fly a real airplane. Not a drone operated from some air-conditioned trailer a half a world away or something powered by batteries that lack capacity or, more likely, something that exists only in a PowerPoint […]

Aero Electric Aircraft Corp.’s solar-electric Sun Flyer airplane made its first public appearance at Centennial Airport in Colorado Wednesday. The proof-of-concept model, in development as a low-cost, environmentally friendly trainer, will be the test aircraft for its FAA certification, AEA said. The company also announced during a rollout event it is partnering with the University […]

The Airbus Perlan Mission II team, which aims to fly a pressurized glider to a record of 90,000 feet, is continuing its flight-test program in Minden, Nevada. Airbus CEO Tom Enders visited the site last weekend, and went for a flight in the glider with the project’s chief pilot, Jim Payne. “Experiencing the Perlan 2 […]

The FAA has certified Robinson’s two-place R44 Cadet helicopter, the company announced this week. The Cadet’s airframe, rotor system and Lycoming O-540-F1B5 powerplant are the same as the company’s R44 Raven I. However, in the Cadet, the rear seats have been removed to provide extra cargo space, the maximum gross weight has been reduced to […]

Chinese officials plan to invest $11.9 billion by the end of this year to expand aviation infrastructure, according to a recent report from Xinhua, the country’s official press agency. Most of the investment will go to airport construction, with 11 key new projects planned and 52 upgrades to existing facilities. “The general aviation sector, especially […]

New technologies that could detect and perhaps also take control of drones that fly too close to airports are now being studied by the FAA, the agency said in a news release this week. The FAA signed agreements with three private companies — Gryphon Sensors, Liteye Systems and Sensofusion — that have developed technology and […]

Two companies, Tailwind and Cape Air, are working to secure FAA approval to fly seaplanes out of Boston Harbor, providing service to Manhattan, the Boston Globe reported today. Both companies plan to fly nine-passenger Cessna Caravans on floats. Both also promise 90-minute service, direct from downtown to downtown, substantially beating the current options — train, […]

It has again become fashionable in some aviation circles to assert that if only we could return to ways and days of yore by getting rid of some or all of the Federal Aviation Regulations and those who enforce them, all would be well and general aviation would zoom into sunlit uplands and robust financial […]