At the General Aviation Manufacturers Association's annual press briefing in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, GAMA president and former military aviator Pete Bunce gave an impassioned argument about the necessity for the FAA to simplify its certification standards, a program the FAA is actually deeply involved in, with GAMA as one of its prime supporters. To illustrate the need for the change, Bunce used the example of angle of attack (AOA) indicators, which are available both on the Experimental market and as certificated products.

What’s wrong with the Boeing 787, which has suffered the unthinkable, unexplained battery fires in places that are inaccessible in flight to the crew? One such battery fire caused an All Nippon Airways 787 to make a forced landing last week. The domestic flight, bound for Tokyo from Southern Japan, made an emergency landing short of the intended destination after the pilots became aware of the battery problems and the smell of fire entered the cabin.

By now, hopefully, you’ve heard the story of pilot Robin Fleming’s lazy glider flight one fine day last summer in the blue skies of beautiful South Carolina. Well, that’s the way it should have turned out, but it didn’t. Instead, that would-be great summer flight ended with Robin getting thrown in jail after a high-stakes criminal drama.

 

Except in this case, there was no crime involved. Not even a whiff of one. Mr. Fleming, an articulate and conscientious 70-year-old glider pilot and instructor was instead arrested simply for going flying.