Stephen Pope

It’s too early to say how the forced landing of Cessna’s diesel 182 JT-A test airplane after an apparent engine failure will impact the certification program. Cessna and French engine maker SMA are now working to determine what went wrong last Wednesday. The test pilot of the experimental 182 JT-A, N9008H, reported to ATC that […]

NavWorx of Rowlett, Texas, has received FAA TSO approval for the ADS600-B, a Universal Access Transceiver unit that provides ADS-B In and Out capability to meet the FAA’s 2020 mandate. NavWorx says the unit sends ADS-B Out information and receives ADS-B In information including ADS-B, ADS-R and TIS-B traffic and FIS-B weather. Options for the […]

They tell us that weather forecasting is seeing dramatic improvements thanks to new supercomputers capable of making hundreds of trillions of calculations per second. The latest computers in the arsenal of the National Weather Service are now more than twice as fast as they were just a few years ago, enabling far more accurate forecasts […]

I once watched a pilot perform a quickie preflight inspection of a Skyhawk at a flight school and then hop in the airplane and try to taxi out — with the tail still tied down. The red-faced pilot shut down and untied the rope as those of us on the ramp offered words of encouragement. […]

Pan Am International Flight Academy, the last remaining vestige of the original Pan American World Airways, is now a subsidiary of All Nippon Airways after the Japanese airline bought the training provider for $139.5 million. The companies said the deal forges “a strong partnership” to meet increasing demand for pilot training worldwide. Pan Am is […]

NTSB investigators say the crash of an Aeronca Champ at Taunton Municipal Airport in Massachusetts over the weekend may have been caused by the pilot’s failure to remove the rudder gust lock before trying to take off. The 1946 Aeronca 7AC reached an altitude of around 50 to 100 feet seconds after taking off on […]

Van’s builders have been practically begging BRS Aerospace to offer its whole-airframe emergency recovery parachutes for the lineup of popular homebuilts – and now BRS has delivered by making the rocket-fired chutes available for the Van’s RV-7 and RV-9. It took some creative engineering to add a parachute to the RV models, but the company […]

The doors to Clearwater, Florida-based Avantair are locked to everyone except a court-appointed bankruptcy trustee after a judge this week ordered an involuntary Chapter 7 filing as the first step in liquidating the troubled company. The bankrupt fractional ownership firm failed to meet a deadline last week to contest the Chapter 7 action as concerns […]

| There’s only one foolproof way to ensure you don’t end up as an accident statistic in yet another stall/spin fatal crash: Avoid stalling in the first place. Yet if the goal is to avoid stalling, why do we spend so much time practicing stalls? After all, 97 percent of stall/spin accidents that start at […]

An Air Force B-1 bomber crashed in a remote area of southeastern Montana on Monday moments after its four crew members safely ejected, officials said. Two pilots and two weapons system officers were aboard the B-1 before it crashed at about 9:30 a.m. near Broadus, Montana. All four were transported to two South Dakota hospitals, […]