FAA and Regs

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has joined the chorus of industry leaders calling on Congress for more money for the FAA. Buttigieg told Reuters legislators need to “pick up the pace” in approving budget money to upgrade the agency’s decades-old computer systems. A failure of the system that serves up NOTAMs prompted a nationwide ground stop […]

The FAA has apparently bent its own rules and allowed Aeromexico to launch a new route to the U.S. Last year, the agency downgraded Mexico’s safety rating to Category 2, meaning it doesn’t believe its aviation regulators can adequately monitor and enforce safety standards. Only a handful of countries have earned that status, and one […]

The Government Accountability Office says the FAA is dragging its feet on integrating drones into the National Airspace System and confounding industry efforts to get their businesses off the ground. In a report published last week, the GAO says the agency needs to step up its efforts to create a comprehensive strategy for drones to […]

If there’s something just about everyone in House of Representatives can agree on, it’s preventing a computer glitch from shutting down the air transportation system. The House voted 424-4 to pass the NOTAM Improvement Act, which would create a task force run by the FAA to stabilize the ancient computers that serve up the NOTAMs […]

The FAA intends to significantly broaden its safety management systems requirement according to a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) published Jan. 11. The new rule would require charter, commuter and air tour operators along with aircraft manufacturers to implement safety management systems. “This proposed rule is intended to improve aviation safety by requiring organizations to […]

The head of Delta Air Lines says the unprecedented nationwide ground stop on Wednesday “is not the FAA’s fault” and called on legislators to boost the agency’s budget. “I lay this on the fact that we are not giving them the resources, the funding, the staffing, the tools, the technology they need,” he told CNBC. […]

Technicians were doing a rare reboot of the NOTAM system when the decision was made to issue a ground stop early Wednesday. The system got glitchy on Tuesday afternoon and the agency found a single corrupted file in both the main and backup system according to sources interviewed by CNN. After nudging the system along […]

Pilots in border regions are wondering why the FAA has deleted much of the aeronautical information from non-U.S. airspace from its latest sectional charts. The late December release of the sectionals omit detailed airspace information in Canadian airspace, and the changes reportedly apply to Caribbean and Mexican regions along the border and off the coast […]

As expected, President Joe Biden has renewed the nomination of Phil Washington to head up the FAA. The agency has been without an administrator for almost a year and there were no hearings to confirm him in the last Senate. The new Senate sat on Jan. 2 and Washington was among several second-time nominations put […]

The FAA has told anyone who got a checkride for an instrument or instrument instructor from a well-known Alaska bush pilot that they may need to redo it to keep their ratings. According to the Anchorage Daily News, the checkrides were conducted by Don Lee between July of 2018 and June of 2022. The FAA […]