Search Results for: general aviation inc

A product liability decision handed down by a U.S. Court of Appeals in North Carolina earlier this year could upend how state courts, as well as aircraft OEMs, view a manufacturer’s responsibilities for aircraft and the parts they create. At issue is whether a state can impose tougher safety standards on aviation than those already […]

It probably can remain unspoken, but an airplane crash is not an item I care to list on my resume. As a professional pilot, that box is something none of us ever wants to check off in our career column. I’m also quite certain that absolutely none of my passengers would care to be participants […]

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) today announced the opening of the fifth GAMA/Build A Plane Aviation Design Challenge. The annual competition uses aviation topics as methods to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) skills among U.S. high school students. As an incentive, GAMA said the first 100 high schools entering the competition receive […]

Bombardier’s popular Safety Standdown will celebrate its 20th year when the doors open Tuesday in Wichita, Kansas. The three-day conference will, as in past years, continue tackling the risks posed to aviation safety by everyday distractions. Safety Standdown often presents new perspectives on topics such as professionalism, crew resource management, aviation security, preventing collisions with […]

A few years back, my parents bought a beautiful tiled wood stove for their home. The first year, they bought a light truckload of wood. But Dad found buying wood to be a pricey way to feed the stove. Being retired with spare time on his hands and the desire for physical work, he decided […]

The FAA’s hotly anticipated ADS-B rebate program launches on September 19, giving aircraft owners $500 cash back to help offset the cost to equip for the 2020 ADS-B mandate. “NextGen has played and will continue to play an important role in ensuring that our airspace is safe and efficient for the American people, and we […]

Veteran pilots know better, because theyve learned that stalls are a normal part of flying, neither an aberration nor abnormal. They realize and understand stalls are simply what happens at the lowest end of an aircrafts normal flight envelope. Stalls when not wanted, not needed, at the wrong time, wrong place bend airplanes and break people. Which brings us to the first and most-important rule to remember about stalls: A stall can occur at any airspeed, in any attitude and at any power setting, from dead engine through full power.

While there are differing statistics regarding causes of aircraft fire-related accidents, it is safe to say that aircraft maintenance and pre-flight actions by the pilot play a significant role in most such events. And since the chances of surviving an in-flight fire without major injury or death are poor, preventing a fire from occurring in the first place should be Job One. Pilots can memorize procedures, talk about scenarios and what-ifs, but when it is all said and done, avoiding one starts on the ground.

Weve previously reported on the FAAs plans to eliminate its very familiar flight plan form with one aligned with the Internal Civila Aviation Organization (ICAO) standards. The ICAO form is and has been required for international flights. Beginning in early 2017, it will be necessary for filing domestic flight plans, too, both IFR and VFR, as well as DVFR and for the Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA) surrounding Washington, D.C. The switchover was to occur earlier this year, then it was to go into effect on October 1.

Understanding how drones-in FAA parlance, an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) is sometimes called a drone-are used is the first step toward avoiding an unexpected and unwanted encounter. In its recently released Part 107 regulations on commercial use of UAS, the FAA focused on small UAS, craft weighing under 55 pounds. Given their numbers and popularity, this is the class of systems with which we should be most concerned.