Two new composite fan blade manufacturing plants for Safran are coming alive this month and are worth hundreds of millions of dollars in investments that indicate the Paris-based company’s latest mark of confidence in the CFM Leap-1 engine and the U.S. market.

Richard Anderson transformed Delta—and with it, the U.S. airline industry

Etihad Airways has an extremely impressive business class product

April 9 marks the 20th anniversary of the roll out of the first 777.

In the public’s view, there are only two choices facing the airlines following the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370: Act now to ensure aircraft can always be tracked, everywhere; or cave in to the airlines’ moan that it is too costly and face the consequences the next time an aircraft vanishes.

The Web has done more than any medium to pin the pejorative label “drones” on unmanned aircraft. But now, two giants of the Internet are taking a new look at the old idea of using unmanned platforms as “atmospheric satellites” to bring affordable, accessible connectivity to all parts of the world (see page 28).

Three big trends are underway in the Chinese airline industry: local government backing of services to promote economic growth, a westward push by carriers seeking to corral new markets and an outward push by airlines trying to make up for decades of underperformance in international operations. Movement on each of those fronts has occurred in the past few weeks.

Talk of streaming flight data from aircraft, sparked by the Air France Flight 447 crash into the Atlantic in 2009, has been rekindled by Malaysia Airlines Flight 370's disappearance over the Indian Ocean.