News

There’s a new airport in the Houston area. Houston Executive Airport (78T) commenced operations earlier this month. Businessman and avid pilot Ron Henriksen built the airport with private funds. It is on the west side of the city and designed to give the business aviation community an alternative to the area’s crowded commercial airports. “This […]

Chelton Flight Systems of Boise, Idaho, has come to the rescue of customers who were left in a lurch by the sudden closure of Direct-To Avionics. The Bend, Ore.-based company abruptly closed its doors in December. Direct-To Avionics was a distributor of systems for kit-built aircraft. Among the components supplied were those for Chelton Flight […]

Four teenage girls in Garberville, Calif., are facing criminal charges and several hours of community service after allegedly trespassing onto a general aviation airport and vandalizing at least five aircraft. “Exactly when the damage happened isn’t clear,” said Brenda Godsey, public information officer for the Humboldt County Sheriff’s office. “We were made aware of it […]

If you can’t save a piece of history in the real world, save it in the virtual world. That’s what was done to the Boeing/United Airlines Hangar that for the past 77 years has graced Iowa City Municipal Airport (IOW) in Iowa. The hangar is slated for demolition to make room for a runway safety […]

Bob Hoover turned 85 on Jan. 24. He has been called a “living legend,” “a magician in the cockpit” — even “the greatest stick-and-rudder pilot who ever lived.” Hoover may actually deserve all that fulsome praise, for his has been a life of doing wonderful, almost magical things with airplanes, not only thrilling a great […]

“This is real and it’s just as bad as we thought it was going to be.” — AOPA President Phil Boyer on the recently released federal budget, which calls for user fees and increased fuel taxes “It is an ironic twist that while DOT Secretary (Mary) Peters said the budget proposal will help get our […]

Pilots have always used their laps as desks. One of the first examples was in 1903 when Charles Manly, the test pilot for Professor Samuel Langley, prepared for a flight of Langley’s Aerodrome by sewing a compass to his trouser leg. The aircraft was launched from a houseboat in the Potomac River on Dec. 8, […]

“You weren’t driving, you were flying low.” Many a teenager or 20-something has heard this from a police officer after being pulled over for drag racing on a city street. Now drag racing is legal in Florida’s Miami-Dade County as long as it’s done at the new drag strip created on the site of the […]

Ballistic Recovery Systems, Inc. (BRS), which manufactures whole-aircraft parachute recovery systems, recently completed a series of successful tests on its Next Generation Parachute System, which is designed to handle much heavier loads, increasing the number of aircraft that could benefit from the systems, according to BRS officials. VLJs are the first target market of the […]