by Isabel Goyer

The details of the near disaster are chilling. A Cessna 172 and an Embraer Regional Jet at Biloxi-Gulfport International Airport in Mississippi were cleared to take off on runways with intersecting departure paths only moments apart. On departure they missed each other, thank goodness, but only by a couple of hundred feet horizontally and by […]

The Cessna Citation Ten, the under-development version of the Citation X, Cessna’s super-fast midsize business jet, made its first flight from the company’s home field, Wichita Mid-Continent Airport, earlier this week. The jet’s first sortie was an unusually long one for a first test, lasting two hours. This gave flight test pilots time to do […]

On Thursday Rod Hightower, the president of the Experimental Aircraft Association, which annually puts on the largest U.S. airshow, called AirVenture, issued a press release announcing a large-scale reorganization in Oshkosh. In the release Hightower said that EAA was looking to “strengthen our organization in several key areas to more effectively meet the needs of […]

In response to the Reno Air Races tragedy and to a number of air show performer fatalities last year, the NTSB convened a one-day hearing on the safety of air races and air shows on Tuesday. The big news is that there’s no big news. At the hearing the NTSB heard from a number of […]

The FAA has recently issued a clarification of what it originally intended as a clarification of its instrument currency rules and the requirements for needing to complete an instrument proficiency check (IPC) for IFR-rated pilots whose proficiency had expired. As is to be expected for the FAA (really for any bureaucracy), the regs themselves are […]

I just got back from a roundtrip flight to Central Florida for a speaking engagement, and even after all these years of flying 1,000-nm trips in light airplanes, I was still surprised by how starkly different the “out” and the “back” legs were. This is one important lesson about transportation flying that no one ever […]

At its Global Sales meeting at Disney’s Epcot Center in Florida, Cirrus unveiled the latest Cirrus SR22 to its dealers, and the big news is, it now has an optional fifth seat. The five-seat layout is not a new model but rather an optional seating layout for the 2012 SR22, so there’s no new model […]

(January 2012) Back in September my column Going Direct entitled “The Chart Is Dead,” I referred to work that Jeppesen is doing to unhinge the chart from our old ideas of what paper is and what it represents. In the brave new world of data-driven depictions, the “chart” is not an object but instead a […]

(January 2012) The question that was being debated around the halls of NBAA 2011 the other week was about as technical and geeky as it gets: When flying a very low approach, lower even than a decision height of 200 feet, where is the proper place for your “head,” that is, your eyes and your […]

__It was a typical November day along the Front Range in Colorado at Rocky Mountain Metro Airport (Jeffco). Against an almost too-perfect sky, the wind was flowing downstream from the west, whistling through the struts and tiedown ropes of the airplanes parked on the wide-open ramp. Looking west toward the Rockies, the sight was a […]