briefs

The Global Flyer, Scaled Composites’ jet-powered creation intended to circle the globe nonstop, had its first flight Friday and everything seemed to work well. Scaled’s Web site says test pilot John Karkow took the long-winged, twin-tailed composite aircraft to 12,000 feet, cycled the gear and flew it from near the stall (54 knots) up to […]

Southwest Airlines and the Transportation Security Administration are investigating the disappearance of a Federal Flight Deck Officer’s (FFDO’s) semi-automatic pistol stowed in his luggage aboard a flight from Las Vegas to Oakland. The pilots blame the TSA’s insistence that the weapons be checked in baggage, when they are deadheading, for the disappearance of the guns. […]

_______COLUMNS Say Again? #34: It’s No Joke It’d be easy to assume some pilots are just stupid, given the behavior AVweb’s Don Brown sometimes sees in his radar screen. But since they’ve managed to work their way through the FAA certification process, it’s more productive to look at the system problems to see why pilots […]

HAVE YOU SIGNED UP yet for AVwebs NO-COST twice monthly Business AVflash? Reporting on breaking news, Business AVflash also focuses on the companies, the products and the industry leaders that make headlines in the Business of Aviation. Business AVflash is a must read! Sign up today at https://avweb.com/profile/ AVweb’s Business AVflash this week sneaks a […]

The two men who brought GPS online are among this year’s inductees to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, along with the inventors of SuperGlue and the sewing machine. Ivan Getting, who died last year, conceived the idea of a Global Positioning System while working at Raytheon during the 1950s. Bradford Parkinson, now a professor […]

On Monday, the FAA published a final rule affecting the T-34 fleet, declaring that the Alternative Methods of Compliance (AMOCs) it had approved for an earlier Airworthiness Directive on wing spars are no longer valid. The rule follows the November crash of a T-34 in Texas, in which two pilots were killed when a wing […]

A Canadian artist for whom an airplane was as fundamental to his art as palette and brush died in a crash in British Columbia Sunday. Toni Onley was practicing touch and goes on the Fraser River just east of Vancouver when his Lake Buccaneer amphibian crashed into about 30 feet of water. There have been […]

An analysis of NTSB crash data by USA Today this week showed that pilots are blamed less often than they used to be, while the incidence of maintenance errors has stayed the same. Improved training and better cockpit warning systems have helped pilots to deal with problems that might have proved fatal in the past, […]

Mooney Airplane Co. said Monday it has negotiated a new 30-year lease for its site at the Kerrville (Texas) Airport. The lease adds stability to Mooney’s operation, said company President J. Nelson Happy. “Our old leases were fragmented, covered too much land and only had nine years left to go. We were reluctant to make […]

The Pennsylvania man who in January was arrested and charged with flying while drunk (for four hours, low over populated areas, through controlled airspace without contacting ATC, forcing diversion of a half-dozen airliners, and within 900 feet of a loaded Boeing 747) had twice been convicted of drunken driving — in 1989 and 1990, The […]