Aviation News

Southwest Airlines has told its employees to expect almost all its regular flights to operate on Friday. The memo came after the shellshocked airline canceled two-thirds of its schedule for Thursday and brought its total of cancellations since Dec. 22 to 15,700. To put that in perspective, the 2,350 flights it’s canceling on Thursday account […]

Hundreds of thousands of people lost their holidays and their luggage over Christmas but a Fairbanks, Alaska, man potentially lost 20 or 30 years of Christmases. As the Anchorage Daily News reported, weather prevented Patrick Holland from keeping an appointment in Seattle to get a lifesaving heart transplant. Holland, 57, had three flights canceled as […]

More than 3,000 students, parents and teachers have registered for the Experimental Aircraft Association’s (EAA’s) AeroEducate program. The online portal, launched just five months ago, is designed to engage users, including more than 750 educators nationwide, according to EAA. Some 1,500 student participants in the AeroEducate program, ranging in age from five to 18 years […]

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production will have tripled by year-end compared with last year’s output. The association projects a total of at least 300 million liters (79.3 million gallons) of SAF to have been delivered in 2022—up from 100 million liters last year. More optimistic projections call […]

The U.S. Air Force is being criticized for accelerating the timeline for retiring its fleet of 11 RC-26 surveillance aircraft. The aircraft, modified versions of the Swearingen Metroliner equipped with electronic surveillance equipment, cost about $30 million per year to operate and the Air Force maintains the mission—mostly domestic border patrol and drug trafficking intervention—can […]

In a holiday weekend performance that the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) deemed “unacceptable,” Southwest Airlines canceled 48 percent of its flights on Sunday (Christmas Day), 70 percent on Monday, and anticipated canceling 60 percent on Tuesday, the latter representing more than 2,400 flights. Casey Murray, the president of Southwest’s pilot union, was not buying […]

Today (Dec. 27), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) published comments it had supplied to the Ethiopian Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (EAIB) regarding the March 10, 2019, crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, a flight involving a Boeing 737-800 Max aircraft. The board said the EAIB “failed to include the NTSB’s comments in its final […]

The U.S. Department of Defense has announced that it will exercise an option for the production and delivery of 26 additional TH-73A training helicopters for the U.S. Navy. The award follows an initial $176 million contract from January 2020 for 32 TH-73As, a second $171 million award from November 2020 for 36 aircraft and a […]

ZeroAvia has been granted a permit by the U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to fly a modified Dornier 228 outfitted with the company’s prototype hydrogen-electric powertrain. ZeroAvia noted that the permit was granted after an “extensive ground testing campaign and a rigorous review of the full development program.” Scheduled to fly for the first time […]

Pratt & Whitney’s PW4000-94 engine has reached its 35th year in operation with more than 150 million flight hours logged. Powering aircraft including the Boeing 747/767, MD-11, Airbus A300/310 and the KC-46A, the PW4000-94 was the first model in Pratt & Whitney’s high-thrust engine family for large aircraft. The 94-inch engine can offer between 52,000 […]