Flight Tracking

A new report this month from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) says the Federal Aviation Administration lacked effective management controls over the “project level agreements (PLAs)—an internal control mechanism for documenting the agreed-upon work and managing project execution” for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). This program was implemented to meet the […]

Red Bull Air Race selected the VectorNav VN-300 Dual Antenna GNSS-Aided Inertial Navigation System (INS) as the primary source of aircraft telemetry data for the Master Class raceplanes participating in the Red Bull Air Race World Championship. The February inaugural event of the 2018 season saw the VN-300 used for the first time in all […]

While the aviation industry in the U.S. is fighting hard to oppose proposals to privatize the air traffic system, Nav Canada, the private not-for-profit company that runs Canada’s ATC, said recently it will refund $60 million in fees to its customers this year. “Higher than expected traffic growth this year has put us in a […]

Nav Canada, the nonprofit corporation responsible for air traffic control in Canada and over the North Atlantic, said Sunday it had restored its automated flight planning system after the main facility housing the equipment was flooded by a thunderstorm in Ottawa, early Saturday. The flood caused the evacuation of the facility and staff moved to […]

The first airline customer for Aireon’s space-based ADS-B tracking services will be Malaysian Airlines, Aireon reported in a press release issued this week. Aireon is placing ADS-B receivers on Iridium NEXT low earth orbit communications satellites, which will receive location reports from ADS-B Out equipped aircraft and relay that position to end users through Aireon […]

A suite of satellites that launched on Saturday are the first of 66 that will expand real-time global coverage for tracking airplanes in flight. Ten IridiumNext satellites, which weigh about 1,900 pounds each, were successfully deployed into low-Earth orbit, about 485 miles above the surface. The satellites will be the first to launch for Aireon’s […]

If the age of the piston engine flight recorder isn’t upon us yet, you can see it from AirVenture 2016, where Jeff Van West spoke with Chris VanHorn from a company called Airbly. They make a clever cockpit monitoring system that automatically records critical flight parameters and downloads them to a smartphone for storage and […]

The FAA will stand up a new advisory committee for the drone industry beginning sometime this summer, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said on Wednesday. Speaking at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International in New Orleans, Huerta said the committee will be modeled after a similar panel organized to funnel industry opinions into the emerging […]

As Amazon bolts at breakneck speed toward package delivery by autonomous drone, it sees future air traffic control and de-confliction as a series of overlapping but collaborating apps in which aircraft and controllers share separation tasks. Amazon’s Gur Kimchi, who’s overseeing the company’s PrimeAir drone development efforts, outlined a view of the future in which […]

Parimal Kopardekar, principal investigator for NASA’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management (UTM) project, is working to create a systemthat would help make it possible for UAS to operate in specified low-altitude zones within the national airspace. He talked with AVweb’s Mary Grady about the technology and its timeline. Duration: 9:45 File Size: 9.1 MB download […]