FAA

Written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the old nursery rhyme goes like this: “There was a little girl, / who had a little curl, / right in the middle of her forehead. / When she was good, / she was very good indeed, / and when she was bad she was horrid.” This sums up three […]

Many people have learned to fly with medical anomalies that years ago would have instantly disqualified them; hearing issues and color blindness are two of the most familiar. The work around is to apply for a waiver of the standard medical certificate as laid out in FAA Order 8900.1. In addition to making certain a waiver applicant […]

The FAA and industry jointly grant a handful of awards for general aviation pursuits each year, and the GA Awards leadership recently announced those they have honored for 2021. The awards for National Flight Instructor, Aviation Technician, and FAASTeam Rep of the Year will be presented at EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in July. The […]

As part of the FAA’s Airport Unmanned Aircraft Systems Detection and Mitigation Research Program, the agency released the names of the five host airports that will become testing sites to evaluate technologies and systems that could detect and mitigate potential safety risks posed by remotely piloted aircraft. The FAA plans to test and evaluate at […]

The FAA last week announced in a news release a $5.4 million dollar fine against the Chicago-based Boeing Company, the aerospace manufacturer whose reputation was severely crippled following the grounding of its 737 Max in March 2019. Over the past two years, the company has continued absorbing both financial and reputational hits against the Max […]

I recently selected 32 accident analyses, from the nearly 500 that I have written since I took over Flying’s Aftermath column in 1980, and assembled them into a book called Why? Thinking About Plane Crashes. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book. I hope someone will buy it. I would pledge that […]

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) […]