The Short Trip from Remarkable to Routine

A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft carrying several thousand pounds of critical scientific hardware and crew supplies is on its way to the International Space Station. Launched atop a company Falcon-9 rocket, the mission—dubbed SpaceX Commercial Resupply Service-28 (alternately, SpaceX CRS-28 or SpX-28)—lifted-off from Launch Complex 39A of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 11:47 EDT on the morning of 05 June 2023.

Intercepting USAF F-16s Occasion Sonic Boom

National Rifle Association (NRA) executive and conservative donor Barbara Rumpel confirmed late Sunday, 04 June 2023, that her daughter, granddaughter, and a nanny had lost their lives earlier in the day when the Cessna 560 Citation V on which they were traveling from Tennessee’s Elizabethton Municipal Airport (0A9) to MacArthur Airport (ISP) on New York’s Long Island went down in mountainous terrain in the vicinity of Montebello Virginia. The aircraft’s pilot also perished.

Save the Date

The Federal Aviation Administration’s Eighth Annual Drone Symposium and inaugural AAM Summit will be held at Maryland’s Baltimore Convention Center. The FAA is pleased to partner with the Association for Uncrewed Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) in the planning and execution of the stakeholder-centric events. Registration for the FAA’s Drone Symposium and AAM Summit is currently open. Detailed information pertaining to the events’ agendas, speakers, and logistics will be made public in the coming weeks.

What’s Up …

Of the staggering 3,970 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses built between 1943 and 1946, only two remain airworthy in 2023: Doc and FIFI. On 02 June 2023, Doc’s Friends, Inc, the Wichita, Kansas-based non-profit organization by which Doc is owned, maintained, and operated, announced the storied aircraft would make a 19 July stop at Mason City, Iowa’s Mason City Municipal Airport (MCW) as part of the B-29 Doc History Restored Tour.

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Textron has unveiled the Cessna Citation Ascend, the newest model in Cessna’s proven and popular 560XL series. Made public on the eve of 2023’s European Business Aviation Convention and Exhibition (EBACE), the Citation Ascend—by virtue of its wholly redesigned cockpit, improved performance, and a more luxurious cabin—pleasantly disrupts the midsize business jet market. Representatives of Airbus’s Perlan Mission II announced its pilots and engineers had completed a successful flight test campaign in the Southwestern U.S., thereby clearing the way for a 2023 attempt to set a new aviation world altitude record for manned, level flight. The pressurized Perlan II glider—which, in 2018, set the subsonic world altitude record at over 76,000-feet—was shipped from the U.S. on 01 May and is currently enroute to El Calafate, Argentina. A sa

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Boeing is standing down from a planned 21 July launch of its Starliner. Boeing vice-president Mark Nappi stated Boeing personnel had spent the holiday investigating issues and elected to delay the test-flight which would have seen NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore conveyed to the ISS. A series of emails reportedly written by RAF pilot selection board members has graphically instantiated the service’s worrying and worsening proclivity to prioritize inclusivity over excellence. Written between 2020 and 2021 and leaked to a legacy Commonwealth news outlet, subject emails illustrate a purposeful and concerted push to systematically exclude White male recruits from and fast-track women and minorities into pilot positions. Nathan K. Hammond has been named as the next recipient of 2023’s Bill Barber Award for Showmanship. Among the airshow industry’s m

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Virgin Galactic has successfully completed its Unity 25 space mission, thinking this makes them ready for commercial service after just a few handfuls of flights. Mission specialists Jamila Gilbert, Christopher Huie, and Luke Mays ventured spaceward for purpose of conducting final end-to-end assessments of Virgin Galactic’s Unity spacecraft and overall spaceflight experience. The first delivery of Cessna's passenger-layout SkyCourier was tendered to Western Aircraft, Inc last week, kicking off the industry's next favorite twin-turboprop, light commuter twin - or so Textron hopes. The delivery marks off the first time a passenger SkyCourier has made its way into operator hands, with previous deliveries consisting solely of cargo variants. GAMA released its first-quarter 2023 General Aviation Aircraft Shipment and Billing Report—compared to the same period in 2022&m

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The Reno Air Racing Association (RARA) is now accepting bids from airports and localities seeking to partner with the organization for purpose of hosting future air racing events. Last March, the Reno Air Racing Association’s board of directors regretfully announced that 2023’s 59th National Championship Air Races—spanning 13 through 17 September—are to be the last held at Reno, Nevada’s Reno-Stead Airport (4SD). North Carolina-based charter and fractional ownership concern Jet It—the world’s 12th largest private jet operator by the metrics of charter and fractional flight hours—is reportedly shuttering its flight operations. The first unmanned SLS launch was made on 16 November 2022. Past successes notwithstanding, the SLS program, as of May 2023, is north of $6-billion over-budget and more than six-years behind sched

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The National Park Service (NPS) and the FAA are rewriting the regulations by which air tours over U.S. national parks are conducted. Extant drafts of the agencies’ Air Tour Management Plans (ATMPs) call for radical and reactionary measures the likes of eliminating air tours in their entirety in some U.S. parks and, in others, cutting such undertakings by as much as 86-percent. Founded in 1992 under the guiding premise “You don't quit skydiving because you get old; you get old because you quit skydiving,” Skydivers Over Sixty (SOS) has evolved into an international organization comprising upwards of 2,650 members hailing from thirty nations. No... we’re not making this up... Attendees of July's AirVenture (and anyone visiting the nearby Fox Valley) can get a taste of some limited-run ale in celebration of the EAA's 70th anniversary. As part of a la

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US Aviation Academy has set forth that it has launched its second Airframe and Powerplant (A&P) training location at San Marcos Regional Airport (HYI)—a public-use airport in southeast-central Texas’s Caldwell County. CAE announced that it is expanding its global network of simulator training centers to Central Europe. The announcement, made at EBACE 2023, set forth that CAE will presently open a new business aviation training center in Vienna, Austria. Operations at the new facility are slated to get underway in the latter half of 2024. The Allied Pilots Association (APA), the labor union by which American Airlines pilots are represented, authorized a strike in the wake of protracted contract talks with the air-carrier. The authorizing of a strike is the first in a long and complex succession of prerequisites that must be met prior to American Airl