History is chock full of aircraft said to have come before their time, with technologies or designs that only gained broad acceptance years after their introduction. Others might be considered more “outside” their time; it’s fair to say the Beechcraft Model 390 Premier I/IA leans toward the latter.
Certainly, the Model 390 looked promising when Beechcraft’s then-owner Raytheon committed to the program in the mid-1990s. The manufacturer leveraged its experience with composite construction from the ill-fated Starship to design a thoroughly modern, single-pilot business jet intended to compete against cross-town rival Cessna’s popular owner-flown CitationJet.
When Louisiana-born Grant Cardone was just 10, his stockbroker father died of a sudden heart attack. “I watched [my mom] struggle with money after my dad died,” he recalls, “and I told her one day I would become super-rich, though I had no clue how to do it. I wanted a man in my life to mentor me, but nobody came.”
So, Cardone struggled. He took drugs and was often kicked out of high school. Now he's a billionaire who owns a Gulfstream G650.
When Bombardier announced two new jets in the Global series—the Global 7000 and 8000—in 2010, the clear intention was that the Canadian manufacturer planned to take away the mantle of building the largest purpose-built business jet from Gulfstream Aerospace’s 7,500-nm G650ER. Originally the two new airplanes were meant to complement each other, with the larger 7000 projected to fly 7,400 nm, while the shorter 8000 would fly the farthest at 7,900 nm.
But times, and markets, change. Bombardier engineers carved out 300 nm more range for the 7000—for a Mach 0.85 NBAA IFR range of 7,700 nm—and the jet’s moniker was changed to Global 7500.
Seventy years ago, in April 1953, Western Air Lines Flight 636 crashed shortly after 11 p.m. into San Francisco Bay, killing eight of the 10 people onboard. According to the accident report, the ceiling was 800 feet broken with visibility of 10 miles in San Francisco when the DC-6 departed, and 700 feet overcast with the same visibility at Oakland, the destination 11.5 miles away.
Flight 636 was cleared under the “visual trans-bay” departure, a procedure for visual flight rules (VFR) operation between San Francisco and Oakland when conditions at both airports had ceilings less than 1,000 feet and/or visibility under three miles. While the approval circumstances were unique to San Francisco Bay, they should sound familiar to modern pilots because, while slightly altered over the years, the trans-bay operation was what we recognize as Special VFR.
Doroni Aerospace has successfully completed the first piloted flight test of its H1 personal eVTOL, the company announced Wednesday. According to Doroni, this was the first flight test of any two-seat personal eVTOL in the U.S., marking a significant milestone for what the company calls the “flying car” industry and market.
While a handful of companies developing so-called “flying cars” are focused on drive-and-fly vehicles that can also operate on roads, Doroni’s creation is simply an eVTOL with a sleek, sports car-like design. The vehicle’s propulsion system has eight electric motors driving ducted fans that are fitted in a main wing and a canard, plus a pair of small pusher propellers behind the fuselage.
If you don't know what bupkis or gonif mean, you've come to the right place. Business Jet Traveler contributor Joe Sharkey explains 15 Yiddish words you may have heard and perhaps not understood.
Here's hoping you encounter only mensches—no gonifs. And no tsuris, either.
The $55 billion civil helicopter market will continue its robust recovery in the coming years, according to a forecast from consultancy IBA. Market-specific factors driving the recovery include the easing of supply-chain constraints, continued growth of helicopter leasing, expansion of helicopter EMS and wind farm service, and increasing demand for super-medium helicopters.
Overall, IBA sees 2023 deliveries of civil turbine engine helicopters to fall in the 475 to 525-unit range against an in-service fleet of 22,000 aircraft.
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