Stephen Pope

We’ve seen Super Cubs land in some pretty interesting places, but none quite as tight as this. Instead of a runway, the pilot chooses to set down on a logging road somewhere in the wilds of Maine. That would be challenging enough, but this particular road is flanked by some fairly tall trees not to […]

Accident investigators have traced a fire that destroyed a UPS Boeing 747 in the United Arab Emirates in 2010 to the lithium batteries being carried in the cargo hold. Unless something is done to prevent similar disasters, the FAA now says such crashes are all but inevitable in the future. A 322-page report issued by […]

Icon Aircraft has finished designing and testing the angle-of-attack indication system in the Icon A5 light sport amphibian and created an informative video showing just how the device works (view it below). The Icon A5’s AoA indicator is a round dial in the pilot’s line of sight showing a picture of a wing that increases […]

The FAA is crafting an airworthiness directive requiring mandatory inspections of the Boeing 787’s emergency locator transmitters following a fire on board a Dreamliner parked at London Heathrow International Airport earlier this month. The fire aboard the Ethopian Airlines 787 on July 12 burned the top of the jetliner’s fuselage in an area where the […]

A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 lost its nose wheel on landing at New York LaGuardia Airport on Monday, spewing sparks as the jetliner skidded on its nose down the runway and injuring eight on board. The incident led to lengthy flight delays at LaGuardia after something went wrong as Southwest Flight 345 landed in light […]

An Air Force drone crashed on takeoff on Wednesday, exploding in a fireball and forcing the closure of a Florida Panhandle highway. Officials said no one was injured but the road could be closed for up to 24 hours. The Air Force shut down Highway 98 near Tyndall Air Force Base west of Panama City […]

A bill that would speed the adoption of new certification standards for light aircraft is on a fast track itself after the House on July 16 passed the measure by a vote of 411-0. The bill now heads to the Senate, where quick passage is also expected. Authored by Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), the bill […]

Much has been said and written about the FAA’s plans to overhaul the decades-old regulations governing the certification of Part 23 airplanes. The new regulations, we are told, will cut certification costs in half. These savings will be passed along to consumers – that is, us pilots. Congress likes the idea so much that it […]

A North Carolina pilot late last night successfully landed his single-engine Piper Cherokee between cars on Highway 321 a few miles short of Hickory Regional Airport after running out of fuel. The pilot, Eric Klein, told a reporter for WSOC that when he ran out of fuel he was too low to make the airport […]

We all know that the Nexrad weather graphics we see on our multifunction displays can be dangerously outdated, showing the location of storms not where they are now but where they were many minutes ago. But did you know that the precipitation data displayed on ARTCC radar scopes suffers from a similar lag? Maybe you […]