Aeromedical

At the Sport Aviation Expo is Sebring this week, we spoke with several manufacturers of light sport aircraft (LSAs) about their expectations for the newly announced FAA BasicMed rule. The people who spoke to us for this AVweb exclusive podcast acknowledged that there are buyers for whom avoiding a medical is the key criterion and […]

For the past week, we’ve been running a survey on what readers think about the just-announced BasicMed program from the FAA. I’m gonna guess here, but maybe I shouldn’t have dived into the data so soon because doing so caused me to have several revelations. One is what a largish crapshoot this whole thing is, […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s web site at www.ntsb.gov. Final […]

Last week, the FAA rolled out the final rule for the long-awaited Third-Class medical exemption. We heard plenty of comments pro and con and in today’s issue, we’re publishing a detailed survey to find out what pilots really think. The survey will take about five minutes to complete and in addition to multiple choice questions, […]

“There were no twists or turns” in the new medical rule issued by the FAA this week, EAA Chairman Jack Pelton told AVweb this week, since the new rule is basically a cut-and-paste from the language that was mandated last year by Congress. “I’d like to tell everyone, just relax,” he added. It will take […]

EAA Chairman Jack Pelton and his staff, along with advocates from AOPA and other general aviation groups, were prominent players in getting the new FAA medical rule pushed through. AVweb’s Mary Grady finds out more about how the new rule will be implemented and how it will affect CFIs, LSA pilots and others in the […]

The full text of the FAA’s new final rule on pilot medicals was published Wednesday morning in the Federal Register, as the general aviation community continued to absorb and react to the news. The final rule, which takes effect on May 1, rewrites the FAA’s rules to comply with legislation that was enacted in July […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s web site atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports […]

The Harvard School of Public Health says 12.6 percent of pilots surveyed may have clinical depression and 4.1 percent reported having suicidal thoughts within the two weeks prior to completing the questionnaire. The study, the first to probe pilot mental health directly rather than through information gleaned from accident investigations, was conducted anonymously and the […]

High-profile aviation accidents usually get a public hearing in which the NTSB reveals what it knows and allows input from other parties on the road to establishing probable cause. Such hearings offer tantalizing factuals but they rarely reveal jaw-dropping lack of judgment. But rarely is not the same as never and this week’s hearing on […]