The landscape of aircraft maintenance has changed profoundly. Yes, the industry was busy before the pandemic and technicians were hard to find but those two factors have accelerated and, along with severe supply chain issues, have created immense challenges for companies that maintain business aircraft.
But despite all that, industry executives agree: business is booming.
What do you do when an aircraft model is perfected? In at least one case, the answer was: you kill it.
The murder mystery that is the Beechcraft King Air F90 can trace its roots back to the 1930s when Walter Beech introduced the Model 18, arguably the first cabin-class twin-engine business airplane. In 1958, Beech debuted the Queen Air, which remarkably resembles today's King Air, except for the square passenger windows and piston engines.
Since the introduction of the enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS) in 1996, more than 16,000 airplanes worldwide have been fitted with the Honeywell-manufactured safety device. In that time, the CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) accident rate among aircraft that carry EGPWS has dropped to zero.
Specifically, the statistics show that after more than 60 million flights over a seven-year span, not a single airplane flying with EGPWS has fallen victim to CFIT. Quite the contrary, on dozens of occasions pilots have reported that the device probably prevented a crash from occurring or broke the chain of events that was leading toward a dangerous situation.
As Boeing continues paperwork exercises for the FAA on its final two versions of the four-member 737 Max family, the programs still face significant barriers to certification as regulators sharpen their focus on several areas of documentation in keeping with the Aircraft Certification Safety Accountability Act of 2020. Speaking with a group of reporters recently during a pre-Paris Airshow gathering near Boeing’s 787 factories in Charleston, South Carolina, Boeing Commercial Airplanes senior v-p of development programs and customer support Mike Fleming said the 737 Max 7 “really probably explains the certification environment” since the twin crashes and subsequent grounding of the Max family derailed progress toward entry into service to an extent no one could have predicted when the company launched the family 12 years ago.
“First, we have the Aircraft Certification Safety Accountability Act, which Congress passed a couple of years ago, which led to new requirements on the Federal Aviation Administration,” he explained. “And then coming from them to us [there are] differences in the means of compliance that we have to show to the regulators to move these things forward.”
FutureFlight: Destinus Flies with Hydrogen Afterburner
Destinus, the European startup developing a hydrogen-powered hypersonic aircraft, has flown its Jungfrau subscale technology demonstrator drone using hydrogen-fueled afterburners. The company said multiple flights conducted at an undisclosed airport near Munich on May 24 marked the world’s first inflight deployment of hydrogen afterburner technology.
The Destinus engineering team developed the afterburner in-house and then integrated it with an existing jet turbine engine. As used on multiple fighter aircraft, afterburners are additional combustion units that generate higher levels of thrust by injecting more fuel—in this case, gaseous hydrogen—into the exhaust stream to support higher speeds and climb rates.
Had enough of the news on TV, your crazy relatives, your annoying neighbors or, well, civilization in general? Maybe it’s time to get away—far, far away.
We’ve compiled a list of six of the world’s most isolated hotels, all of which are in the proverbial middle of nowhere.
Last summer, with the shackles of Covid removed, business jet demand in Europe hit record levels. Flight activity rose 13 percent above 2021 numbers during the season last year and was 23 percent above 2019’s summer peak, the previous high, according to Hamburg, Germany-based flight-data specialist WingX. In the charter market, that demand created shortages of aircraft, as well as of landing slots and parking spaces at popular destinations.
The good news for this summer: Part 135 operators, brokers, and support professionals report that the charter community is better prepared for the seasonal onslaught, which they anticipate could outpace the demand last summer.
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