Legal Matters

Ending weeks of speculation, President Biden on September 7, 2023, submitted Michael Whitaker as his nominee to become the 19th confirmed Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration. If confirmed, he would be the first non-acting head of the agency since Steve Dickson resigned on March 31, 2002. Since then, the position has been filled by […]

In recent months, a number of notable and high visibility events have occurred in the National Airspace System (NAS). While the overall numbers do not reflect an increase in incidents and occurrences, the potential severity of these events is concerning. Six serious runway incursions have occurred since January 2023, including an incident at John F. […]

Due to Alaska’s wide-ranging geography and limited road system, residents are heavily dependent upon air travel. In October, the FAA released the final report of its Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative (FAASI), which provides an up-to-date look at the continued problems plaguing the state’s aviation infrastructure. Completed in response to a 2020 recommendation from the NTSB, […]

When a federal appeals court in April ruled, in part, that flight instruction constitutes carriage of a person for compensation, it perhaps unwittingly created a storm of uncertainty in the U.S. flight training community and those operating aircraft in the three categories primarily affected: limited, experimental and primary. As we noted in June’s issue, the […]

What started earlier this year as a novel legal interpretation of FAA regulations by a U.S. Court of Appeals has evolved into a full-blown policy dispute between the agency and some of aviation’s alphabet soup. As we explored in our June issue, the court’s interpretation is that FAR 91.315 “does not provide an exemption for […]

Separate bills passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in mid-June were developed to help improve the Notice to Airmen (Notam) system and allow incentive payments for early completion of airport projects. The legislation, H.R. 1262, the Notice to Airman Improvement Act of 2021, introduced by U.S. Rep. Pete Stauber (R-Minn.) and cosponsored by U.S. […]

As the Covid-19 pandemic’s effects on aviation stretched into the final calendar quarter of 2020, the FAA on October 1 released a final rule extending deadlines for “persons who have been unable to meet certain requirements during the national emergency” surrounding the disease. The updated special federal aviation regulation (SFAR 118-2) was scheduled to be […]

Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. (Stop me if youve heard that before.) The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We-both this magazine and the industry as a whole-spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, determining if the aircraft is capable, and making honest evaluations of our own performance in considering how and when to conduct a flight. But once we identify the need to mitigate a risk, we sometimes have little space left over to describe the tools we can use. Lets try to fix that.

Since Eric is a working controller, I respect his advice. I was a little surprised when he stated that filing direct grinds controllers gears. With GPS capability, filing direct has saved me a lot of time and money. It was never realized that doing so was creating a problem for anyone. It was not done as a sign of laziness or to engage in a bad practice, but to get in and out of the ATC system as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The event perhaps most demonstrative of what can happen as an aircraft ages occurred on April 28, 1988, over Hawaii. Thats when an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737-200 operating in scheduled passenger service as Flight 243 between Hilo and Honolulu lost part of its cabin roof while in cruise at FL240. The crew successfully landed the airplane after diverting to Maui. Of the 89 passengers and six crewmembers aboard, there was one fatality-a flight attendant who was swept overboard during the decompression event.