FAA and Regs

At least two severely drunk airline pilots have been arrested before allegedly trying to fly passengers over the holiday period. The most recent incident was a Sunwing Airlines captain who was found passed out in the cockpit early Saturday while his flight was being boarded in Calgary, Alberta. The unidentified pilot had to be revived […]

EAA and AOPA have filed formal comments with the FAA that raise questions about the agency’s proposed Airworthiness Directive regarding certain NavWorx ADS-B units. AOPA asked the FAA to provide more information about the unit’s reported deficiencies, and to better explain the necessity for the proposed AD. “The safety benefits offered by UAT [Universal Access […]

Transport Canada has issued a Civil Aviation Safety Alert recommending owners and maintainers of virtually all older Piper Cherokees perform magnetic particle inspection of the welds on the control columns of their aircraft at the next annual. As we reported last May, a Canadian flight instructor reported the column broke off in his hands as […]

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 FAA is hoping to avoid millions of laser strikes this holiday season with a warning about seasonal laser projectors. “The FAA’s concern is that lasers — regardless of the source — not be aimed at aircraft where the beams can threaten the safety of a flight,” the agency’s Eastern Region offices said in a […]

A publication for antique car buffs is reporting the Environmental Protection Agency is intent on ending the production of ethanol-free gasoline, known in aviation as Mogas. Hemmings Daily said the Renewable Fuels Standard issued by the EPA a couple of weeks ago sets eliminating ethanol-free gasoline as a goal. It quotes the EPA as saying […]

The FAA on Friday finalized new aircraft certification rules for general aviation that are expected to help the industry bring new designs and technology to market more quickly and cheaply. The new Part 23 rules, first proposed in March, will go into effect in August 2017, changing the FAA’s traditional prescriptive design requirements to performance-based […]

The FAA published a final rule on Tuesday that will allow operators to use an enhanced-vision flight system to descend all the way to the runway, under certain conditions. Currently, the FAA allows pilots to depend on enhanced vision in lieu of natural vision only to 100 feet above the runway, and only under certain […]

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 […]

With winter on the way for much of the U.S., the FAA has released a new training video about the dangers of ice-induced stalls. “Much has occurred since NASA’s original 1998 ice-contaminated tailplane stall video,” the FAA said. “The information in this training video supersedes, supplants, and replaces the instruction in all previous NASA tail […]