Brazil’s thrice-elected president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is slated to meet with China’s leader Xi Jinping on April 14, in a pivotal visit between the nations with a potentially profound impact on western aerospace.
As it prepares to fly a hybrid-electric demonstrator in 2024, De Havilland Aircraft of Canada says it’s all about designing an aircraft for a bad day.
DHC and Pratt & Whitney Canada are preparing to heavily modify a retired Dash 8-100 turboprop that will see half of its traditional propulsion replaced with a hybrid design. For the project, Pratt is designing a “new small engine” for sipping fuel at altitude. The 39-seat aircraft will have 20 to 24 battery packs to drive a 1 megawatt electric motor working in tandem with the new engine, providing the necessary horsepower when it’s needed most — at takeoff and climb.
Yet, over the past week, chatter across a cadre of Chinese aviation watchers and social media postings suggested that the prototype MA700 had made its maiden flight around Sept. 23 or 24 from the the Aviation Industry Corporation of China’s (Avic) manufacturing plant at Yanliang Air Base in Xian, where China produces many of its military aircraft. The new April 2021 footage was the first public appearance of any MA700 progress since March 2020 when Avic and Xian rolled-out the first static test airframe. Chinese state media had reported in early 2020 that MA700 was slated to fly before the end of that year.
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Log-in here if you’re already a subscriber Release DateSeptember 9, 2019Newcomers De Havilland and Mitsubishi find themselves dwarfed by their...
