Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee has released the first data retrieved from the so-called black boxes of the UTair ATR 72-200 turboprop that crashed shortly after takeoff from Tyumen’s Roschino airport on April 2 killing 31 of the 43 people onboard.

Airbus has started the final assembly process of the A350 in Toulouse, kicking off a two-year period in which the aircraft maker hopes to validate the new twin-widebody in ground and flight demonstrations before it begins customer deliveries in 2014. The first aircraft assembled will serve as the static ground-test article. The second A350-900 (MSN1) will be the next aircraft down the line and the first flight aircraft. Assembly is to start in the summer and first flight is to occur in 2013.

The U.S. faces a critical engineering shortage. U.S. high school students' science and math scores are off the international pace. Competitiveness is at risk. That's the conventional wisdom, now elevated to accepted truth. But a group of academics now argues that these assumptions are flat wrong.

Following extensive preparation, Oneworld is one step closer to integration through the launch of its information technology (IT) hub, with new member Air Berlin its first user. But for the next few weeks its entire focus will be on keeping the alliance itself integrated with LAN on board and adding TAM after their merger to form the Latam Group possibly in the second quarter.

Mention superconductivity in the context of aircraft propulsion and the skeptics come out in force. But NASA is convinced this technology—still exotic to aerospace—can reduce the fuel consumption and noise of future aircraft. The agency believes turboelectric distributed propulsion (TeDP)—gas turbines generating electricity to power many small fans embedded in the airframe—can meet its aggressive goals for a 2035-timeframe airliner, slashing fuel burn 60% from today's Boeing 737s and 777s.

Here is a notion that will make airlines smile and airframers cringe: oil at $40 a barrel. In a high-profile address to the International Society of Transport Aircraft Trading conference in Phoenix, economist Adam Pilarski raised eyebrows with the prediction that crude prices—a key driver of demand for new, more fuel-efficient jets—will crash to $40 by 2018.

The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines' (CAAP) failure to pass an FAA review and Indonesia's spate of drug cases involving local airline pilots, suggests neither country will escape aviation safety blacklists anytime soon.

Boeing and Airbus have wildly different assessments of the fuel economy of each other's new jets.