Search Results for: mexico

Finishing off a series of firsts Sunday, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the first splashdown in the Gulf and the first anywhere in more than 45 years. (Remember the mission? It was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975.) This was officially a demonstration mission for final proving […]

Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley rode their SpaceX Dragon capsule to a flawless splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday right on time at 2:48 p.m. EDT marking the U.S.’s successful return to manned space launch business after a nine-year absence. “Welcome back to Planet Earth and thanks for flying SpaceX,” Mission Control said […]

A joint NASA-Boeing independent review team has completed its evaluation of three anomalies that occurred during the December 2019 orbital flight test of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner crew capsule. During the uncrewed test, the Starliner team ran into intermittent space-to-ground communication issues and two software coding errors that resulted in the capsule failing to make it […]

During my primary training and for a few years thereafter, weather awareness was drummed into me by pilots and mentors whose opinions I respected. As one consequence, I didn’t fly many overnight cross-countries when I could get caught by weather, nor did I go “take a look” at poor weather very often. Once I got […]

NASA has announced the selection of Kathy Lueders as the agency’s next associate administrator of the Human Exploration and Operations (HEO) Mission Directorate. Lueders replaces Doug Loverro, who resigned from the position on May 18, less than two weeks before the first crewed launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon. Although the exact circumstances that led to […]

Sure as the BRS Save‑O’‑The‑Month calendar flips to a new year, we here at the Department of Self‑Righteous Finger Pointing present the best of the dumbest ways pilots have contributed to keeping the skies safe by rendering as many aircraft as possible unairworthy. Today, we review the year 2016, which reflected a modest improvement in […]

One thing I’ve had a visceral reaction to over the years is when popular media describe a certificated pilot who flies for personal reasons as an “amateur.” Over the years, I’ve more or less accepted such usage but—when given the chance—point out that the type of operation has no bearing on pilot skill levels, and […]

Commuter airline Southern Airways Express has announced that it is launching a new seaplane service in partnership with New York-based Tailwind Air. The flights are part of a codeshare agreement and will offer service from Manhattan to East Hampton, Montauk and Shelter Island, New York. The aircraft, all amphibious Cessna Caravans, will be operated by […]

Technologies develop, sometimes slowly over time, with the kind of sloth that makes you wake up one day, see an evolved landscape, and question your strongly held beliefs. Such as: For any airplane you’d consider flying in instrument conditions, at least a modicum of redundancy is required. We used to want fully distributed systems to […]

A pilot friend who knows more than I do about everything once said, “All air traffic controllers should first be pilots.” He was buying the beer, so I agreed. At the time I was both a pilot and a controller. Today, I still fly but haven’t said “Cleared to land” with any authority in years. […]