briefs

A British newspaper says FBI fears that an al-Qaida operative may be working as a pilot for a British airline are behind flight cancellations last week. The Daily Mirror says American investigators will screen all British pilots flying to the U.S. to try and root out the suspected mole. The paper quotes unnamed sources as […]

____________BRAINTEASERS Quiz #76 — The Weather Outside Is FrightfulIn the age of Stormscopes, Doppler radar, and data uplink you’d think the weather would get the message and behave. But no, pilots still need to analyze the skies for themselves, with a little free help from flight service. See how you weather these questions. ____________NEWS FEATURES […]

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A busy Sunday morning at Houston’s Terminal Radar Approach Control facility, working the post-Christmas rush, took a turn for the worse when staffers were faced with a messy, aromatic, and disgusting sewage spill inside the building. Controllers continued to work, taking breaks every 20 minutes to seek fresh air outside the facility. The FAA slowed […]

Colorblindness Cited As Possible Factor In FedEx CrashThe NTSB is looking into a pilot’s colorblindness as a possible cause of the crash of a FedEx plane in Tallahassee in July 2002, the St. Petersburg Times reported last week. The first officer may have failed to distinguish red lights in the Precision Approach Path Indicator beside […]

The U.S. Marine Corps has filed paperwork for two proposed military operations areas (MOAs) that would force GA pilots flying near North Carolina’s Outer Banks into an area that the military considers unsafe for its own pilots, AOPA said on Monday. “If the FAA permits these two MOAs, they will have an unavoidable adverse effect […]

OK, British pilot Polly Vacher had to turn back in the face of bad weather last month, after flying her Piper Dakota to the Antarctic peninsula. Australian pilot Jon Johanson was stranded for days after landing at McMurdo-Scott Base in need of fuel. He finally took off after gassing up from Vacher’s unused cache. And […]

Just minutes after the British Beagle-2 lander touched down on the surface of Mars last Thursday, NASA’s orbiting Mars Global Surveyor snapped a picture of the landing site and found a deep crater right in the center of the targeted area. “We’d have to be incredibly accurate and incredibly unlucky to go right down this […]

When New Zealand pilot Kelvin Stark, 58, found himself alone above the Pacific Ocean last week, with fuel-flow problems in the new PAC 750XL single-engine skydiving plane he was ferrying to California, other pilots tried to help, the New Zealand Herald reported Monday. In the dark, overcast night, Stark reached out on 121.5 and found […]

AVMAIL/ AVmail: December 29, 2003Reader mail this week about security level Orange, the attempted replication of the Wright Brother’s flight, Enola Gay protestors and more.