FAA

For decades, pilots holding a first or second class medical were automatically disqualified from flying commercially if they were diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetic pilots are subject to losing consciousness and suffering seizures if their illness is not properly treated. To the FAA, the risk of a pilot passing out at the controls was always too […]

Part of preparing for your flight training means making sure you have the right tools with you—whether your day’s learning session involves time in the sim, ground lessons, or a flight. Here, we assemble a representative kit that will outfit you for training, with a selection of ideas from products we’ve tested over the long […]

With the FAA January 2020 deadline for U.S. aircraft to be equipped with ADS-B Out looming, the agency said last week it has completed the last of the necessary work on the new state-of-the-art surveillance system that will enable air traffic controllers to track aircraft with greater accuracy and reliability. The last two of the […]

When pilots talk about “the regs,” they refer in general to the portion of the Code of Federal Regulations that govern aeronautical activity. To be specific, the regulations that cover the flying you will do initially as a student and as a certificated pilot live in the 14th volume of the CFR and divvy up […]

Handling emergencies and unusual situations is a significant part of learning to fly and remaining current to fly any airplane. Flight training can’t possibly teach pilots how to handle every single event they could encounter, however. With that concept in mind, pilots are often taught to look for the similarities between one event and another […]

The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) recently announced the award of $986 million in airport infrastructure grants to 354 airports in 44 states, Puerto Rico and Micronesia. The awards will be used for runway reconstruction and rehabilitation, construction of firefighting facilities, noise mitigation, emissions reduction, and the maintenance of taxiways, aprons, and terminals. With 3,332 […]

In response to what the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) considers to be “far too many preventable accidents involving Part 135 flight operations in Alaska,” the Board convened a Part 135 Flight Operations Roundtable on September 6, 2019, in Anchorage. Since 2008, the NTSB has investigated 182 accidents involving fixed-wing scheduled and non-scheduled Part 135 […]

Stephen Dickson became the 18th FAA administrator on August 12, 2019, as sworn in by U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. The ceremony took place in the West Atrium of the U.S. Department of Transportation in Washington, D.C. “I am honored to join the outstanding team at the Federal Aviation Administration and look forward to ensuring […]

No matter your perspective about the integration of drones into the national airspace system (NAS), Skyfront’s recent flight of its Perimeter 4 hybrid gas-electric drone beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) of the operator looks like nothing other than a complete success. Conducted over a rugged, four-mile stretch of mountainous terrain along the Trans-Alaska pipeline, the unmanned aerial vehicle […]

After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June in the wake of an emergency airworthiness directive issued by the FAA and EASA this past spring, Tamarack Aerospace Group says it is again installing its Atlas active winglets on Cessna Citations. The move follows a decision by safety regulators in the U.S. and Europe to again […]