briefs

The next crop of air traffic controllers might be well-advised to brush up on their PlayStation or Xbox skills before applying. The FAA unveiled its new air traffic controller training school last week in Oklahoma City, prompting one newspaper to report that the training simulator “looks like a video game on steroids.” Indeed, it looks […]

The Office of Special Counsel, which handles issues raised by federal government whistle-blowers, says it’s concerned that 1,228 A&P mechanics who may not have been properly certified have not yet been re-examined. Two whistle-blowers in the Orlando FSDO complained that a re-examination program for mechanics who had earned their papers through St. George Aviation was […]

SMA, the French company trying to convince the aviation world that diesel engines are the future, is now under the control of SAFRAN, the parent company of Snecma, a French jet engine maker. The piston-engine company was formerly a partnership of Snecma, Renault and EADS but SAFRAN bought out the other two. The diesel company […]

Grand Lake Regional Airport in Afton, Okla., could go to the highest bidder (and an unknown fate) in August even though the FAA has invested more than $1.3 million in improvements there. When airports accept federal money, they make a deal to keep the facility open to the public. But the public body that owns […]

Running the local airport can sometimes be a stressful, even unpopular position, but life-threatening? That’s the underlying theme of an investigative report by a New Jersey newspaper that has federal, state and local officials re-opening their files on the suddenly mysterious crash of a light twin in Hillsborough in 1998. According to the report in […]

Security workers at Westchester County (New York) airport watched early Wednesday as beer cans fell from the cabin of a stolen C-172 as the 20-year-old student pilot and his two 16-year-old passengers extricated themselves from the cabin following a 4:15 a.m. taxiway arrival. While the 20-year-old does not hold a valid pilot’s certificate he did […]

COLUMNS Say Again? #51: Lost Communications — NORDO — Part 2You’ve made it almost all the way to your destination, in the clouds and lost comm … what now? How do you get down, and how does ATC figure out what you’re going to do once you decide? AVweb’s Don Brown is as confused by […]

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There are not many low-level-approved aerobatic pilots who didn’t start flying until they were in their mid-30s but Michael Hunter had a good reason for starting late. As an insulin-dependent diabetic, he wasn’t allowed in the cockpit — any cockpit — until the FAA relaxed its medical regulations in 1997. Hunter, now 41, is on […]