Looks to lessons of past as it plots future of PT6 and successor

Dispute pits U.S. airlines against U.S. security concerns

ATR estimates airlines will buy 1,340 turboprop airliners with 90 seats during the next 20 years, which sounds like a good market. But it could be a cramped one. If all five of the aircraft proposed for the segment go ahead, each will average a production run of fewer than 300.

While Aviation Week's annual Top-Performing Airlines (TPA) study is the most extensive comparison of global airline strength, there is still one type of carrier that it does not include. The study only covers publicly traded companies, which means the TPA rankings exclude the large Middle Eastern carriers such as Emirates. So Aviation Week has run a separate analysis of Emirates to estimate where it might fit in the rankings if it did meet our criteria.

Earl L. Wiener, known to many as a founding father of aviation human factors, died on June 14 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif., after a long battle with Parkinson's disease. He was 80.

Swelling aircraft orderbooks are prompting questions about whether deliveries could inflate airline capacity too much in coming years. But Boeing maintains that a supply overload is unlikely to occur, and it has identified a set of metrics it says proves that market conditions justify the size of the current backlog.

Five years after General Electric launched its initiative to penetrate the small turboprop market with the acquisition of Czech engine maker Walter and the development of the H80, the company is midway through its first full year of production and poised to bolster its line-up with studies of additional variants.

Carbon in its many forms is transforming manufacturing, from electronics to structures. Aerospace uses carbon in fiber form, but new nano-structured materials are emerging that promise improved properties and expanded applications.