FAA and Regs

The FAA has announced its acceptance of 30 published ASTM International consensus standards for certification of normal category Part 23 airplanes. The new Means of Compliance (MOC) are, according to the FAA, “an acceptable means, but not the only means, of showing compliance to the applicable regulations in Part 23 [and] provide at least the […]

The FAA is once again allowing doors-off operations on commercial flights carrying passengers as long as passenger restraint systems comply with its newly published rules. The administration issued an order prohibiting doors-off flights last March after a helicopter conducting a sightseeing flight crashed into New York City’s East River, killing all five passengers onboard. First […]

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 website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports […]

Fourteen aviation organizations including AOPA, EAA and GAMA are asking the FAA to reconsider its position on not allowing pilots access to weather data from hundreds of non-federal weather stations. Currently, non-federal weather stations must be equipped with AWOS-III or better to be included in the FAA’s Weather Message Switching Center Replacement (WMSCR), which collects, […]

The U.S. Department of Transportation has chosen ten state, local and tribal governments to participate in the FAA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Integration Pilot Program (UAS IPP). The selected governments are located throughout the U.S and will work with private sector participants to collect information on drone operations. “Data gathered from these pilot projects will form […]

The whole-body impact of type 1 or type 2 diabetes can affect eyesight, heart function and kidney output. It can lead to fatty liver disease, skin infections, osteoporosis and even dementia. No other disease–except perhaps an autoimmune disorder–carries this kind of whole-body risk. Clearly, losing any of these capacities risks your pilot privileges, let alone […]

The Aviation Safety Reporting System, ASRS, is a means of confidentially and anonymously reporting unsafe conditions—including your own actions—in aviation, generally without fear of FAA enforcement. Most of us are at least somewhat aware of the ASRS program, but few of us really understand how it works. This is an important program that is of […]

The rollout of the FAA’s streamlined low-altitude airspace approval for drones rolled out this week with few hiccups, according to an FAA official at the AUVSI XPONENTIAL show in Denver. Wider deployment is expected later this year. The program is called Low Altitude Authorization Notification Capability—LAANC—and is the product of a cooperative effort between the […]

A new FAA Airworthiness Directive responding to the recent engine failure on a Southwest 737 will require initial and repetitive inspections of the fan blades in CFM56-7B engines, based on the accumulated fan-blade cycles, the FAA said on Tuesday. The AD (PDF), scheduled to be published on Wednesday, aims to “address the risk of fan-blade […]

It’s a small step, but the Transportation Department on Monday took what could be the first move toward allowing the widespread commercial use of drones to transport cargo, and eventually, passengers as well. The DOT—the parent of the FAA—published a “notification of procedures” (PDF) on Monday stating that it will provide “certificate or exemption authority” […]