Aviation News

NASA has awarded medals to six Northrop Grumman Corporation employees for their contributions in designing and building the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb Telescope team vice president and program manager Scott Willoughby and director and chief engineer Charlie Atkinson received NASA’s Distinguished Public Service Medal; Webb director of vehicle engineering and sunshield manager Jim Flynn […]

Bell Textron announced on Wednesday that it has handed over its 189th AH-1Z Viper twin-engine attack helicopter to the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC). In addition to completing the program of record (POR) for the model, the delivery is also the last for the USMC’s H-1 upgrade program, which was launched in 1996. Bell completed deliveries […]

The Seattle Times is reporting the FAA has ordered mandatory inspections of all 63 DHC3 Otters on the U.S. registry to confirm the correct assembly of the control links to the horizontal stabilizer. It’s specifically interested in ensuring a lock ring that secures the control mechanism is in place. The mandate comes after the NTSB publicly […]

More than 26,000 people responded to the FAA’s request for comments on the ever diminishing airline seat and they were pretty much unanimous. In fact, at least 200 commenters described airline travel as “torture” because of the seats. From claimed injuries to class warfare to economic discrimination, the litany of horrors tied to seat dimensions […]

A federal judge has ruled that Boeing doesn’t have to pay for the career disruption suffered by pilots who were freshly typed in the 737 MAX when it was grounded in March of 2019. According to Simple Flying Judge Steven C. Seeger, of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, agreed […]

Life imitated art over Maine in mid-October when a first officer on a TUI Airways Boeing 787 was felled by suspected food poisoning. The aircraft, which was on a charter flight from Doncaster in the U.K. to Melbourne, Florida (used by some holiday charters as a cheaper alternative to Orlando), had only two pilots for […]

As recalled in a story posted on military.com, one of the first American military pilots to respond to a UFO report lost his life while at the controls of his F-51 Mustang piston fighter (changed from P-51 to F-51 after World War II) in January 1948. But it wasn’t advanced alien laser weapons that brought […]

Pipistrel Aircraft, now a division of Textron Aviation, has delivered its first all-electric Velis Electro aircraft to Canada. The two-place high-wing went to the Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Aeronautics (WISA) at the University of Waterloo. The institute’s partner, Waterloo Wellington Flight Centre (WWFC), will use the aircraft for research and in “a collaborative capacity to […]

Real-world operational trials of so-called Interval Management (IM) procedures are set to begin with flights into and out of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport (DFW). The FAA has partnered with American Airlines over the past few years to certify and install ADS-B In avionics on AA’s fleet of Airbus A321 single-aisle airliners. The trials involve […]

Like the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB) posts an annual “Watchlist” spotlighting its top concerns. This year’s list, its 12th annual offering, cites runway incursions and overruns among eight overall safety shortcomings that “require government and industry attention [and] that are the result of hundreds of investigations.” The TSB […]