briefs

Canadian air traffic controllers are threatening “job action,” but that won’t affect pilots and travelers immediately. It’s illegal for controllers to walk off the job. About the only leverage they have in the current contract dispute with Nav Canada is to cease training new controllers, which would eventually lead to a shortage of qualified controllers. […]

We can look forward to more accurate, longer-range weather forecasting if the National Weather Service‘s new computer system lives up to its billing. IBM has clustered 44 servers together to create a byte-crunching monster that can do 7.3 trillion calculations per second. Its ultimate capacity is expected to be 100 trillion calculations per second by […]

Does your company let you fly your personal airplane on business trips? Or do the suits in the corner office look the other way when you hand in your expense reports? Our sister publication, Aviation Consumer, is preparing a report on corporate policies for light aircraft use and we would like to hear owner experiences […]

The January 8, 2003, crash of a Beech 1900D shortly after takeoff from Charlotte-Douglas International Airport that killed two crewmembers and 19 passengers was flown by Air Midwest (d.b.a. US Airways Express). We thank the good (and communicative) folks at Midwest Express for their enthusiastic patronage. Scaled Composites has informed AVweb that there will be […]

There’s an old saying that the outside of a horse is good for the inside of a boy, and that may just hold true for airplanes as well. Some folks at Flabob Airport in Riverside, Calif., are trying out that theory on five young high-school-age gang members, by inviting them into a hangar to help […]

An FAA Airworthiness Directive issued on Monday affirms a fact that pilots have long suspected: having a wing (or two) separate from the airplane in flight would be a bad thing. This AD affects (Moravan) Model Z-242L aircraft, which are built in the Czech Republic. It beefs up a prior AD that restricted Acrobatic and […]

We’ll bet you didn’t know that June is not only National Dairy Month but also National Learn To Fly Month. With Father’s Day falling smack dab in the middle, on June 15, perhaps the question is whether your Dad would prefer his first flying lesson to a block of Brie. The folks at Be A […]

When a Russian-made Yakolev-42 crashed in Turkey last week, 62 Spanish troops returning from Afghanistan were killed, along with 13 crew members. The accident raised questions in Spain about aviation safety, and on Sunday the Spanish government banned the use of aircraft from former Soviet-bloc countries, CNN reported Monday. Spanish officials at first defended the […]

Helios, an unmanned solar-powered flying wing created by AeroVironment, is now being prepared for another NASA-sponsored major milestone — the world’s first multi-day fuel-cell-powered flight in the stratosphere. The aircraft in 2001 shattered the world altitude record for non-rocket-powered aircraft by flying to 96,863 feet, powered solely by silicon solar cells mounted on its wing. […]

The NTSB has released its final report on a January 2002 incident when a China Airlines A340 took off from a taxiway in Anchorage, Alaska. The airliner, with 252 souls on board, left tire tracks in a snow berm, but climbed out safely and completed its flight to Taipei. The NTSB found as probable cause: […]