FAA

Unveiled at Oshkosh 2019, the new Extra NG has now been approved by the FAA, adding to the EASA certification it saw in the fall of 2019. The news signals the beginning of deliveries into the US and other customers, and a new step forward for Extra. We talked with Walter Extra about the process […]

You can imagine our deep sense of grief when occasionally we’d return to a city on our ground-school circuit and someone would say, “Did you hear about Bill?” “No,” we’d say, “what happened to Bill?” They would then explain the aircraft crash that had killed Bill. It happened all too often. We began to realize […]

Though hundreds of American Airlines passengers were inconvenienced last week when American Airlines subsidiary PSA Airlines grounded its fleet of Bombardier CRJ700 and CRJ900s –because of worries about potential mechanical issues—the efforts should not go unnoticed in an era of anxiety about aircraft safety. The grounding affected some 230 PSA flights system wide, with most […]

A new safety tool, the Dynamic Regulatory System, recently released online by the FAA, brings together documents and data from more than a dozen agency repositories. The DRS combines more than 65 document types—upwards of 2 million regulatory documents—into one searchable application, including all of the information found in the Flight Standards Information System (FSIMS) […]

The latest order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stating that operators of flights coming into the US must confirm that passengers have had a negative COVID-19 test has caused some confusion in the media, as reporting from some mainstream outlets seemed to indicate that the rule applied only to scheduled airlines. […]

If you think back to the days when you regularly travelled aboard an airliner, you’ll remember it’s a federal crime to interfere with a flight crewmember carrying out their normal duties. Practically, that usually meant some poor flight attendant trying to deal with a passenger who’d had too much to drink. Since the pandemic hit […]

The US Department of Transportation and the FAA issued a Final Rule (PDF) on January 6 2021 to facilitate the safe development of civil supersonic aircraft. The rule streamlines and clarifies procedures to obtain FAA approval for supersonic flight testing in the United States. The rule will help ensure that companies developing these aircraft clearly […]

On December 28, the FAA announced the release of final rules covering unpiloted aircraft or drones in the National Airspace System in the US. Not surprisingly, the new rules call for the remote identification of drones (known as Remote ID), allowing operators of small drones to fly over people and at night time under given conditions. At […]

Most US pilots probably don’t know that an FAA license is required to conduct any kind of commercial space launch or reentry within the United States. Last year, the agency office that issues these permits said it was busier than ever, with 41 commercial space operations launches and reentries. One launch in May, a SpaceX […]

The very fluid situation surrounding emergency-use authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech has moved fast in the last few days, and initially, pilots, unions, and aviation associations were in a holding pattern awaiting guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The question to be answered was whether pilots—especially those who make their living flying […]