Heart Aerospace has doubled down on its plans to bring an electric regional airliner to market, unveiling a design for a 30-seat ES-30 that will now replace the 19-seat ES-19 the Swedish startup announced in 2020. During a September 15 event at Heart’s Gothenburg headquarters, Air Canada and Swedish aerospace and defense group Saab each committed to investing $5 million in the venture.
Air Canada also placed a provisional order for 30 of the ES-30s, which Heart says will mainly be powered by four battery-driven electric motors, now bolstered by a pair of turbo generators to meet reserve energy requirements, “without cannibalizing range.” The new model is expected to offer carriers an all-electric range of 200 km (125 miles), with an extended full-payload range of twice that distance and the potential for longer hybrid-powered flights to 800 km (500 miles) with 25 passengers on board, taking account of standard airline fuel reserves.
At 9:25 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, the Department of Transportation, via the FAA, ordered the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) closed to all civil flights at its 460 controlled and 15,000+ non-tower airports. Canada’s Ministry of Transport followed suit within one hour.
Directed from the Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) at Washington Dulles, the FAA’s 17,500 controllers directed the landing of some 4,300 tracked airborne targets and ordered the diversion to Canada of 120 inbound overseas flights, while the remaining inbound airplanes returned to the countries of origin. Nav Canada landed the diverted traffic and its domestic airborne traffic before unplugging its service.
Advanced air mobility (AAM) is still a long way off. The chief problem: infrastructure.
That was the consensus of a diversity of speakers at the recent Vertical Flight Society (VFS) Electric Aircraft Symposium in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Experts pointed to a plethora of potential roadblocks including the need to raise massive amounts of capital for AAM infrastructure, the complexity of folding autonomous flight into the national airspace system, and the costs associated with bringing sufficient electric power to vertiports.
European airlines and passengers faced yet another day of major disruption on Friday due to a strike of French air traffic controllers that forced France’s aviation authority DGAC to impose limitations on the number of flights. The industrial action, called by the country’s largest air traffic controllers’ union SNCTA after talks over wage increases to compensate for the high inflation collapsed, will run from September 16 at 04:00 UTC to 04:00 on September 17.
The union, which also accuses French officials of failing to recruit sufficient controllers, noted that it had already filed a new strike notice for three consecutive days, from September 28 to 30.
Northrop Grumman unveiled the first MQ-4C Triton high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) maritime surveillance UAV for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) on September 14. The ceremony, held at the assembly and test facility at Palmdale, California, was attended by military and government officials from both the U.S. and Australia.
Construction of the first Australian aircraft began in October 2020 at Northrop Grumman’s production facility at Moss Point, Missouri. The fuselage and one-piece wing assemblies were mated in Palmdale in December 2021. The air vehicle is scheduled for completion in 2023, with delivery to Australia slated for the following year.
The used bizjet market is still on fire, with some models commanding prices that are higher than what the aircraft sold for new just a few years ago. Perhaps nowhere is this insanity more manifest than in what I will call the large end of the light jet market—a sector dominated by the Pilatus PC-24, Embraer Phenom 300/E, and Cessna Citation CJ4.
All three aircraft offer respectable speed and range, a comfortable cabin for their size, and decent operating economics, fuel prices aside. In this triumvirate, the CJ4 does not provide the most modern avionics or the roomiest cabin, but it may well be the best value.
Destinus, a Swiss startup that aims to develop a hydrogen-powered hypersonic aircraft for high-speed cargo deliveries, has resumed test flights with its Jungfrau technology demonstrator after the initial test flight of a second, larger prototype didn’t go as smoothly as planned.
The company is developing a fully autonomous aircraft that can fly at hypersonic speeds exceeding Mach 10. This “near-space” hyperplane would operate in the mesosphere (160,000 feet to 330,000 feet), flying higher than any existing aircraft.
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