Flight Safety

Sonic booms rattled the southeast coast of Florida Friday evening as two F-15s were scrambled to intercept an aircraft that violated presidential restricted airspace over West Palm Beach. The fighters had to hit the afterburners to catch up to the unidentified “general aviation aircraft” after taking off from Homestead Air National Guard Base, about 100 […]

Airport operators and flight schools in the Palm Beach, Florida, area are bracing for long-term economic loss and disruption due to the presidential TFR covering President Trump’s visits to his Mar-a-Lago resort. For the third weekend in a row, the presidential TFR covering Trump’s visit has shut down busy Palm Beach Country/Lantana airport and disrupted […]

What the camera and teleprompter giveth, it can just as rapidly take away. That would be my salient observation from Harrison Ford’s recent dust-up at the Orange County Airport in California. You will not have missed, I’m sure, the story that Ford flew his Husky over the top of a stopped American Airlines 737 and […]

NBAA and four businesses have petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals to review the FAA’s deal with the City of Santa Monica to shorten the airport’s runway. Under the deal, the runway would be cut immediately to 3,500 feet from almost 5,000, limiting its use and likely forcing some of the current tenants to immediately […]

More than 90% percent of certification work on new aircraft and aircraft parts is outsourced by the FAA to the manufacturers themselves, according to a GAO report. Similar to the FAA delegation of airman certification authority to Designated Pilot Examiners, the FAA has been authorizing most certification work to be performed by employees of the […]

Truth is often stranger than fiction. Perhaps that’s why reports from the Aviation Safety Reporting System are so compelling. There is a lot to be learned by reviewing the mistakes other pilots have made—and who then lived to tell us about them. Here are some recent ones that have several critical learning points. Attitude Indicator […]

Military pilots aren’t flying often enough to be as proficient as they need to be, Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, the head of Marine Corps aviation, told reporters in Washington, D.C., recently. “We’re about three hours per pilot per month better than we were [in May 2015], but that’s not good enough,” Davis said, according to […]

A Canadair CRJ-700 operated by PSA Airlines struck a deer during takeoff from Charlotte’s Douglas International Airport on Wednesday morning. In an air traffic control recording (full audio from LiveATC.net below), the pilot and the tower controller discuss an unidentified “loud bang” heard by the pilots, which the pilot of another aircraft reported as a […]

NBC News reported Tuesday that Harrison Ford mistakenly landed his Husky on a taxiway at John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California, on Monday, after flying above an American Airlines 737 full of 110 passengers and 6 crew. The FAA told NBC that Ford was given correct landing instructions by ATC, and he read them […]

General aviation pilots have several auto-fume modes. One of them is ADS-B and anything to do with medicals is a good way to get people spun up. So is the argument that the administrator of the FAA should be a pilot. This is a perennial and it came up last week when President Donald Trump […]