This week’s aviation news highlights consisted of some remarkable stories, including the Air Force’s new top-secret fighter jet, some fancy flying at a real live fly-in, more drama with the Boeing 737 Max, and much more to go along with more fires and a new hurricane.
The western wildfires continue to dominate the news, though there’s sadly the additional element that the smoke they are generating is not only affecting flight training and other operations but has spread across the continent, with pilots in the flight levels on the East Coast reporting obscuring levels of haze from the fires.
Yet another hurricane, Sally, hit the Gulf Coast, with torrential rains and catastrophic flooding in coastal and low-lying areas. Unlike Hurricane Laura, which two weeks ago hit the region with 100 mph winds, causing much damage, Laura was very slow moving, which exacerbated the rainfall totals, which reached almost two feet in some places.
The USAF revealed the existence of a new, unnamed fighter jet that has already flown, setting unspecified records in the process. The Sixth-Generation Air Dominance fighter will presumably assume the lead role in fighter ops from what’s already the most capable plane in the sky, the Lockheed F-22 Raptor, which is Fifth-Gen jet. The Air Force is being so tight-lipped that it won’t even reveal the plane’s manufacturer.
Ashli Blain, a 19-year-old Montana college freshman, spent her summer battling blazes in the American West. Despite her age, Blain is already a command pilot in the Sikorsky Blackhawk and a co-pilot in the Chinook. Mad props.
Ampaire made more test flights of its electric/conventional propulsion Cessna 337 demonstrator. The company flew a newly modified version of the plane, with improved battery placement and weight distribution, on flights in Hawaii to demonstrate the potential of such operations for future short haul air taxi use.
In what was an equal opportunity beat down, the US House Transportation Committee found that the failure of the 737 Max was the fault of Boeing’s mismanagement of the program and the FAA’s “grossly insufficient oversight” of it.
To no one’s surprise, general aviation manufacturing slumped in the first half of 2020, with all segments down by double digits. Piston plane production was the least impacted, with a decline of just over 10 points when compared with the first half of last year. The falloff was blamed on the coronavirus pandemic.
Airbus is woke about wakes. The European airliner maker, CNN reported, is exploring potential cost savings of airliners flying in formation to save fuel by leveraging the wake of the lead aircraft. In other news, in the real world, no one expects this to actually happen.
Stuart King, the founder of Mission Aviation Fellowship (MAF), died at the age of 98. King’s vision for MAF was to use small aircraft to link up remote locations around the world for humanitarian and missionary purposes. MAF is at work in more than 25 countries around the world.
Dan Johnson, volunteer president of the Light Aircraft Manufacturers Association wrote last week that the FAA could be in the process of updating the regs governing Light Sport Aircraft (LSA). In his story, which appeared in General Aviation News, Johnson said that faster and larger planes with more occupants might be in the cards, though the FAA is holding those same cards close to the vest, he wrote.
