The official unveiling of Pratt & Whitney Canada’s PW800 turbofan at this year’s National Business Aviation Association convention marked a sea change in the provision of engines for the world’s long-range business jets.
Executive Editor Jim Asker discusses the Japanese regional jet project with Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief Bradley Perrett and Jens Flottau, managing editor for commercial aviation.
We look at the new features being introduced in the cockpit of Gulfstream's G600 and the Pratt & Whitney PW800 engine that will power the new ultra-long-range business jet.
Reflecting the growing importance of North Africa as a business aviation base, the Middle East and North Africa Business Aviation Association is hosting its first dedicated event for North Africa, the MEBAA Morocco show, in September 2015.
Just seven years into his career, Thomas McGuire is leading a Skunk Works project to find the “Holy Grail” of low-cost and low-impact energy in the form of nuclear fusion.
An innovative partnership between NASA and SpaceX is giving the U.S. space agency an early look at what it would take to land multi-ton habitats and supply caches on Mars for human explorers, while providing sophisticated infrared imagery to help the spacecraft company develop a reusable launch vehicle.
The Lockheed Martin F-35 aircraft, fielded for training and operations around the country, continue to fly under a restricted envelope following a June 23 engine fire in an F-35A. The Pentagon has yet to announce a definitive path to dealing with the design problem on the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine that prevented the F-35 from making its international debut at the Royal International Air Tattoo and Farnborough air show in July.
The search for MH370 has resumed with refined Inmarsat data in play, although skeptics maintain that searchers still do not have all the information they need
NASA’s $8.8 billion James Webb Space Telescope program was rebaselined in 2011 and has since adhered to its revised cost and schedule estimates for a planned launch atop an Ariane 5 ECA rocket in 2018, but technology challenges could threaten the agency’s ability to keep it on track.
Opinion: USAF has the rare opportunity to improve U.S. national security, impose costs on an aggressive foreign power, promote American technological innovation and create jobs at home.
The Airports Council International (ACI) World Governing Board met this week in Durban during the 23rd Annual ACI Africa Assembly, Conference and Exhibition and discussed how best ACI can assist airports in their response to the Ebola outbreak.
John L Garrison, Bell Helicopter's president and chief executive officer claims Africa is such an important focus for the company's attention writes Jon Lake.
The device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being “compact,” Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations and, potentially, large aircraft.
While the U.S. Special Operations Command has seen its force size and budget grow despite the current fiscal austerity sweeping Washington, it is looking not for new platforms but for ways of obtaining more data from its existing unmanned air systems, especially small ones such as AeroVironment’s man-portable, hand-launched RQ-11 Raven.
Momentum is solidly behind fielding manned-unmanned teaming technologies for Army aviation assets. Combining video feeds and weapons of manned and unmanned platforms provides significantly better situational awareness to troops on the ground and dramatically improved efficiency in focusing weapons to support ground elements.
The RQ-7Bv2 incorporates several improvements, including extended endurance, encrypted data link and reliability upgrades. The U.S. Army plans to upgrade all of its 102 Shadow systems, each with four aircraft, to the new configuration. The biggest capability change is introduction of the Ku-band tactical common data link, already carried by the Army’s larger General Atomics MQ-1C Gray Eagle UAS.
While the Air Force and Navy programs will share elements and technologies, the two services have distinct requirements that likely cannot be reconciled into a single program. Still, the two services continue to pursue a joint analysis of alternatives to fully vet the need for separate programs.
