China's ARJ21-700 made its first flight on Nov. 28, GE Aviation announced (ATWOnline, Oct. 10). The GE CF34-10A-powered regional jet reached an altitude of 9,000 ft. during the 1-hr. flight, which took place approximately 11 months after rollout. The aircraft is produced by Commercial Aircraft Corp. of China. A second flight is planned for this month, "followed by engineering flight tests in early 2009," GE stated.

A PASSENGER-TO-FREIGHTER AIRCRAFT conversion is not a simple matter. It's not the actual conversion process that is particularly complicated; there are a number of companies with the capability to do modifications. Rather, it is the process before the conversion takes place that is among the most tangled in the aviation business. An airline needs to ground an aging passenger aircraft and then determine a price at which to sell it. A lessor or another airline needs to be seeking to add a freighter and agree to pay that price.

There won't be any significant breakthrough [in engine emissions] for at least three decades. There's no technical fix. All we can do is reduce the amount we fly." So says Joss Garman, founder of the anti-airline PlaneStupid.com environmentalist website. But talk to Mike Benzakein, Wright Brothers Institute professor and chair of the Aerospace Engineering Dept. at Ohio State University, or Alan Epstein, former R. C. MacLaurin professor of aeronautics and astronautics, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and you get a starkly different story.

Russia's Sukhoi Civil Aircraft Co. is pressing ahead with the type certification schedule for its Superjet 100 ahead of launching serial production next year. On Nov. 5, a specially chartered An-124-10 flight operated by Volga-Dnepr Airlines transported fuselage, wings and empennage to the Siberian Chaplygin aviation research center in Novosibirsk for assembly of a second prototype for full-scale static tests.

ILFC Chairman and CEO Steven Udvar-Hazy confirmed last week at the ALTA Airline Leaders Form in Cancun that American International Group "is in the process of selling ILFC to a group of investors, including management."