Australia will receive an extra Eurocopter NH90, known by that country’s military as the MRH90, after the program fell three years behind plan. Australian Aerospace, Eurocopter’s local arm, will deliver a 47th MRH90 for free, the country’s defense ministry said in a statement Thursday, adding that the agreement will help put the program “back on a [...]
Aviation buffs looking for something besides an old warbird or the latest Gulfstream to add to their collections might want to consider this: a former U.S. government DC-9. Why? Well, this McDonnell Douglas bird, known as a VC-9C, once served as Air Force Two. That’s right, in it’s heyday, N681AL hauled vice presidents around for [...]
Air India has launched test flights of its Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft, which have been fitted with new battery packs following battery fire incidents in January, as the first of these sophisticated planes was flown from Mumbai to Delhi via Ahmedabad. By Friday, two Dreamliners will be test-flown several times daily between Delhi and Amritsar [...]
1888 – Birth of Francesco Baracca, Italy’s top fighter ace of World War I, credited with 34 aerial victories. 1926 – Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett make the first flight over the North Pole in a Fokker F.VIIa-3 m. Their total distance from Spitzbergen, Norway, is 1,600 miles. 1943 – A German night fighter crew defects to the U.K., flying a Junkers Ju 88R-1. The defection gives British scientists and tacticians access to a Lichtenstein airborne interception radar for [...]
More than 65 years after flying fighter planes over Europe, the Red Tail pilots of the Tuskegee Airmen will have a monument designed to honor their World War II exploits while inspiring kids to seek careers in aviation. “It’s like a dream come true,” said retired Red Tail pilot Leo Gray on Tuesday during a groundbreaking ceremony [...]
The sequester won’t stop a beloved tradition after all. For a time, it was looking like this year’s U.S. Air Force Academy’s graduating cadets would not get to have a flyover at their commencement ceremony in Colorado Springs, Colo., due to the sequester grounding the Thunderbirds demonstration team. But now two museums, one local and one [...]
1891 – Birth of James Robert Smith, Canadian World War I flying ace. 1914 – A civilian pilot, René Caudron, makes the first French shipboard takeoff in an airplane from a ramp constructed over the foredeck of the seaplane carrier Foudre, using a Caudron G.3 amphibian floatplane. 1937 – Lt. Col. Mario Pezzi of Italy’s Regia Aeronautica [...]
A crew on Tuesday began recovering pieces of a Grumman G-44 Widgeon that crashed in the Hudson River near Germantown, N.Y., last Thursday. The crash killed the pilot and sole occupant, Michael Braunstein, 72, of Copake. Todd Gunther, the investigator in charge for the National Transportation Safety Board, said about one-quarter of the wreckage has been [...]
