FAA and Regs

A low setting sun may have been a factor in a runway collision between a T-28 Trojan warbird and a Cessna 172 at Compton Woodley Airport near Los Angeles on Wednesday. A student in the 172 was killed and an instructor seriously injured. The T-28 pilot was unhurt. A video of the incident shows the […]

Ethiopia’s transport minister told reporters on Sunday that preliminary data from Ethiopian Flight 302’s flight data recorder showed “clear similarities” to data pulled from a similar Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed off Indonesia last October. Dagmawit Moges said the FDR, which appeared significantly damaged from the Ethiopian crash, is actually relatively intact. […]

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation (MCAS) system at the center of investigations into two fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 was misunderstood and mischaracterized in a flawed certification process as Boeing and the FAA rushed to bring the new jet to market, a Seattle Times investigation published Sunday alleges. Citing named and unnamed sources, […]

Flight 1549 Capt. Chesley Sullenberger has weighed in on the MAX 8 discussion but from a crew training and experience perspective. The pilot who deadsticked an A320 into the Hudson River after a dual engine failure 10 years ago with the help of First Officer Jeff Skiles said in a Facebook post on Saturday that […]

This week, AVweb’s news roundup found reports on new aircraft batteries from True Blue Power, a website supporting congressional action to allow flight operations at airports closed by presidential visits and good news for several military airfields in the U.K. True Blue Power introduced its new, fifth-generation main ship batteries at the Helicopter Association International […]

Boeing 737 MAX Grounding I strongly suspect that many (if not a majority) of airlines do not include enough aircraft handling simulator training on their conversion courses, especially on difference courses. For example, converting from the B737-800 to the 737 MAX should include simulator training specifically aimed at how to deal with a malfunctioning MCAS, […]

The FAA has uncovered new information from the wreckage of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 “concerning the aircraft’s configuration just after takeoff that, taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft’s flight path, indicates some similarities between the ET302 and [Lion Air] JT610 accidents,” according to the emergency order issued by the […]

President Donald Trump has announced the issuance of an emergency order grounding all flights of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft in the U.S. as of Wednesday afternoon as a result of the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Sunday and Lion Air Flight 610 last October. The president said he has spoken with Secretary of […]

I suspect if you walked around the back of 800 Independence Ave. in Washington, you’d find a tanker truck of Maalox with two-inch lines running into the C-suites upstairs. The political pressure on the top echelon must be like nothing else we’ve seen in quite a while. While the rest of the world rushes to […]

A teenager has petitioned the FAA to exempt him from its minimum age requirements so he can set some records. The young man, 15, wants the FAA to allow him to be a fully certificated private pilot before he turns the minimum age of 17 so he can pursue some records that would be ambitious […]