Week on the web

On his blog The DEW Line, Stephen Trimble addressed a question: what happens to Scaled Composites after Burt Rutan?

As the Cro(ft) Flies carried a piece that followed up on John Croft's YouTube post about the landing crash of a militarised Air Tractor AT-802U variant in October 2010, and on a just-published NTSB preliminary report about the Uvalde, Texas crash of a turbine AT-402 - from which, miraculously, the pilot walked away with no injuries.

Croft's conclusion? "I would not like to be a participant in an aircraft crash, but if I were forced to do so, I'd want to be riding in an Air Tractor."

Croft also posted video from the first flight of E-volo's manned 16-rotor electric multicopter in Germany last month.

And on Ariel View, Arie Egozi labelled the Taxibot being developed by Airbus and Israel Aerospace Industries "a revolution in aircraft ground movements".