FAA and Regs

The burned wreckage of an Antonov An-2 biplane with 13 people on board that crashed last June in Russia was found late Saturday, and officials confirmed that all 13 were found dead at the scene. The airplane had taken off after 11 p.m. from an airport in the Ural mountains, reportedly by “revelers … who […]

Nearly 4,800 repair stations around the world provide aircraft repair services to U.S. carriers, and the FAA is not doing enough to oversee them, the Transportation Department Office of Inspector General said on Monday. “We found that while FAA developed a risk-assessment process to aid repair station inspectors in identifying areas of greatest concern, its […]

The FAA says it needs more information before it can decide whether to exempt the Icon A5 from the upper weight limit restriction for amphibious light sport aircraft and allow it to weigh 1680 pounds. As AOPA reported last week, the agency wrote a letter (PDF) to Icon President Kirk Hawkins that due to “the […]

Russia has ordered its airlines to avoid Syrian airspace after a charter airliner with 159 passengers and eight crew aboard escaped a possible missile attack Monday. Russia Today quoted Interfax as saying the the Nordwind Airlines A320, on a flight from an Egyptian resort to Kazan in Tatarstan, was over the mountains of Syria when […]

The FAA has cancelled all employee furloughs, and the National Airspace System should be back to normal operation. The action on Saturday followed legislation rushed through Congress to allow the agency the flexibility to use judgment over where the $637 million in sequester cuts it must make will come from. Congress acted under mounting pressure […]

Ethiopian Airlines became the first to launch a revenue flight with the Boeing 787 since early January with a flight from Kampala to Nairobi, Kenya. “We would like to thank Ethiopian Airlines for the patience, support and leadership shown throughout the period that the 787 Dreamliner has been grounded,” Boeing Commercial Airplanes President Ray Conner […]

Congress Friday approved legislation that could put an end to furloughs of air traffic controllers and other FAA personnel that have correlated with a spike in commercial flight delays, but the bill may do even more. The legislation would allow the FAA to transfer up to $253 million from other programs to fully staff controller […]

Amid speculation as to whether a spike in airline delays concurrent with recent FAA furloughs have been created as a tool for political leverage or are an inevitable result of sequester cuts, the White House Wednesday hinted that changes may soon come to FAA spending restrictions. White House press secretary Jay Carney Wednesday told reporters […]

About 300 contract workers, most of whom provide training for air traffic controllers at the FAA’s Mike Monroney Aeronautical Center in Oklahoma City, have been laid off due to federal budget cuts. The workers are employed by Raytheon and subcontractor ISG, according to local news reports. “This is something that is happening because of the […]

Despite efforts on several fronts to stop or at least postpone the FAA’s furloughs of air traffic controllers, which are mandated by the federal budget sequester, the staffing cuts began on Sunday. By midafternoon on Monday, delays up to three hours had been reported at major airports in New York, Los Angeles, and Baltimore, but […]