Aviation Law

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced today in a memo that YouTuber Trevor Jacob, 29, agreed yesterday (May 10) to plead guilty to a felony charge for obstructing a federal investigation. According to the plea agreement with the U.S. States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California, Jacob admits he deliberately destroyed the wreckage […]

The FAA has told Tennessee state legislators to back off plans to take over control of Nashville International Airport’s board of directors until it has had a chance to assess the move. The Republican-controlled state government has drafted legislation to replace the current seven-member board of directors appointed by the mayor with an eight-member board, […]

Boeing lawyers say the company shouldn’t have to pay for the pain suffered by victims of two 737 MAX crashes because they couldn’t possibly have felt any pain. The Wall Street Journal is reporting Boeing’s legal team says the law in Illinois, where this case is being heard, doesn’t allow their families to be paid […]

The FBI was involved in the arrest of Long Beach, California, man accused of repeatedly pointing a laser at numerous aircraft over the past year. The feds and Long Beach Police detectives claim they caught Mark Allan Barger shining his powerful green laser at a police helicopter before they nabbed him. He’s been charged with […]

Congress has approved an amendment to a 2020 law that will allow the FAA to certify Boeing’s 737 MAX 10 and 7 models without updating the crew alerting systems. Those systems will have to be updated eventually, but the exemption allows certification to continue in the face of a 2020 rule that gave manufacturers to […]

AOPA says the requirement for a Letter of Deviation Authority (LODA) for CFIs to teach in experimental aircraft will end with President Joe Biden’s signature on the latest defense authorization bill. The bill passed by the House on Dec. 8 contains the language necessary to end the paperwork exercise. “The bill is expected to pass […]

The European Commission has approved a scaled-back plan for France to ban airline flights that can be replaced with train trips of 2.5 hours or less. Three popular flights from Paris’s Orly Airport to Nantes, Lyon and Bordeaux will be stopped for three years and the impact assessed after that. Last April the French government […]

Five crew on a Canadian charter aircraft have been told they will be allowed to leave the Dominican Republic about seven months after they were arrested on what they claim were bogus drug charges. The Pivot Air CRJ crew was jailed after they reported finding almost 500 pounds of cocaine in the aircraft’s avionics bay […]

A Delta Air Lines captain has won a complete legal victory when the company finally threw in the towel on a six-year dispute that one judge said “weaponized” a mental health investigation against her. As we reported in 2020, Capt. Karlene Petitt was awarded $500,000 by a Labor Department tribunal. The airline was also forced […]

Hungarian budget carrier Wizz Air has repatriated one of four A320s stranded in Ukraine in what looks like an off-the-books dash to Poland. The airline has confirmed the flight, which operated from Lviv, about 40 miles from the Polish border to Katowice, about 200 miles inside Poland, but offered few details on how they pulled […]