Aviation News

(April 2011) If the souls of the pilots whose untimely ends are chronicled in NTSB accident reports could be assembled for a focus group on accident prevention, some would say of their final flights, “Yes, I was really asking for it. I should have seen that accident coming from a mile away.” Others would still […]

FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt made clear yesterday that he has had enough of air traffic controllers falling asleep during their shifts, and to get his point across he has vowed to start making personal visits to ATC facilities around the country starting next week. The final straw came Tuesday night when the lone tower controller […]

In a unique show of cooperation among competitors, representatives from 10 light sport aircraft manufacturers and dealers on their way home from Sun ‘n Fun flew their demos to Georgia and South Carolina last week to participate in the 2011 Southeast LSA Tour. Over the course of four days, the group made four stops for […]

Finally, Beechcraft G36 Bonanza pilots can fly with the peace of mind of having ice protection. The FAA has awarded a new Supplemental Type Certificate (STC) for the G36 to CAV Aerospace in Salina, Kansas, for its TKS Flight Into Known Icing (FIKI) system. The G36 STC is an amendment to CAV’s STC for the […]

Contracts designed to make greener, quieter airplanes awarded to industry and academic teams. Research teams from Boeing, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cessna Aircraft Company and Northrop Grumman Systems have received a total of $16.5 million to develop technologies for quiet, more fuel efficient airplanes to enter service between 2030 and 2035. The time period […]

In a selection process reminiscent of the bidding for an Olympic host city, NASA on Tuesday announced the new retirement homes for the four remaining space shuttles, which have been carrying astronauts into space for three decades. The space shuttle Atlantis will be displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida, which observers […]

The FAA on Monday said the new David J. Hurley Air Traffic Control System Command Center in Warrenton, Virginia, is fully operational and ready to coordinate traffic flows across the national airspace system. “If you think of our national airspace system as an orchestra, the Command Center’s the conductor,” said Transportation Deputy Secretary John Porcari. […]

Giving in to pressure from the FAA and pilots’ groups, the Federal Communications Commission has officially abandoned a plan to ban the sale, manufacture or use of emergency locator transmitter beacons that transmit on 121.5 MHz. The FCC last June issued a notice of proposed rulemaking that sought to outlaw the use of 121.5-MHz ELTs […]

The disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the deep water Atlantic while en route from Rio to Paris on June 1, 2009, shocked the world and left a web of mysteries. What happened to bring the Airbus A330 with 228 people aboard down in the middle of the dark night? Theories, many of them […]

In an interview with British magazine T3, Virgin Galactic chairman Richard Branson again did what we love about him: he waxed optimistic about the future of private commercial space flight. The launch a decade ago of a civilian manned space program in the United States seemed at the time to be a starry-eyed and quixotic […]