by Isabel Goyer

The FAA last week issued a final rule intended to prevent FAA inspectors from working for the airlines they previously oversaw for two years after they leave the agency. The rule applies to FAA personnel who had oversight responsibility over the airlines (as well as over fractional providers and other firms that offer commercial air […]

Most pilots know that FlightSafety International is a huge and successful training organization, but not all of them are aware that it is also a world-class simulator manufacturer. On Tuesday, the company cut the ribbon on its new manufacturing facility in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. The state-of-the-art 375,000-square-foot plant has 19 assembly positions for manufacturing everything […]

__One of the things I love best about airplanes is their back stories. While the **Embraer Legacy 650** is a brand-new airplane, its story stretches back 30 years to when the Brazilian company first decided to start building airliners. My personal tour of the cockpit of the Embraer Legacy 650 immediately reminded me of the […]

(September 2011) No matter how much we might want to deny it, this age in which we live is defined by new technologies, new behaviors and new ways of looking at and interacting with the real world. Nowhere is this clearer than in the fast-changing world of publishing, where the model for how we deliver […]

Icon Aircraft last week released the details of its remarkable week at AirVenture. The startup LSA manufacturer scored a total of 143 deposits for its composite folding-wing Icon A5 amphibious sport airplane, which pushes the order book to nearly 700, the company said, turning the calendar for first available delivery positions into 2015. The company […]

When Lillian Bernhagen of Worthington, Ohio, heard the loud thump in her backyard during a storm this weekend, she didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t for several hours, when authorities came knocking on Bernhagen’s door, that she learned the source of the noise. There was a blimp in her backyard. The 128-foot-long airship, belonging […]

Continuing a tradition of success in South America with its single-engine utility airplanes, Cessna recently inked a deal to sell nine 208 and 208B Caravans to the Brazilian Air Force (Força Aérea Brasileira). These airplanes bring the total number of Caravans Cessna has delivered to Brazil to 32, to complement the many other existing Caravans […]

Deborah Hersman earned a second term of the National Transportation Safety Board last week. The two-year term runs through 2013. Hersman has been a busy and active leader of the board. While her first term was thankfully free from any major U.S. airline accidents, she nonetheless oversaw investigations into a number of high-profile crashes, including […]

It goes without saying that the ultimate goal of any flight is to arrive safely. It’s no secret that certain kinds of accidents typically target certain kinds of pilots flying certain kinds of airplanes. There are always a few accidents every year that involve freak or tough-to-defend-against events, like bird strikes or unforeseeable structural failures. […]

The introduction of Garmin’s new GTN touch-screen navigators, the GTN 650 and the large GTN 750, is remarkable in itself, but the fact that we’ve almost come to expect such works of seeming magic in our cockpits made me think back to the original precursor of the GTN products, the GNS 430, which I met […]