Flight Safety

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a new system for generating electricity that couldshow promise for powering small airplanes.”The potential energy density of this power source is on the same scale with petrochemical energy sources, and it is orders of magnitude higher than commercial lithium ion batteries,” Michael Strano, an […]

Congress once again has delayed taking substantive action on FAA funding issues, as the House voted yesterday to extend the current FAA budget through mid-July. The FAA’s budget is due to expire on March 31. Competing proposals in the House and Senate have failed to gain enough support for passage, as lawmakers argue over whether […]

We can argue about a lot in aviation, but one thing we rarely dispute is the unwritten rule that your AME and your doctor shouldn’t be the same person. Unpack the logic of that and two things become implicit: We don’t trust the government with our medical data (rightfully) and, if we’re honest, we want […]

Experts will examine three pieces of debris found over the last two weeks that might be from the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, Malaysia’s Transport Minister Liow Tiong Lai said today. One fragment was found by a South African family visiting in Mozambique. They took the item back home with them, and South African authorities […]

Officials at the Germanwings airline couldn’t have done anything to prevent last year’s fatal crash, according to the final report (PDF) issued yesterday, because they were not informed by anyone — “neither the co-pilot himself, nor by anybody else, such as a physician, a colleague, or family member” — that Andreas Lubitz was suffering from […]

Going through Air Force pilot training at what was Williams Air Force Base (now Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport), we used tactical call signs for our training flights, and one of those was “Foe.” The numeric portion of the call sign was determined by the last two digits (minutes) of your scheduled takeoff time One day, a […]

Almost 5,000 people attended Women in Aviation’s annual convention in Nashville. The meeting wrapped up Sunday and the group celebrated awarding more than $10 million in scholarships since the inception of the scholarship program in 1995. “Thousands of women made powerful connections this week that will enhance their lives and careers for years to come,” […]

An airport janitor was arrested Saturday after a pilot reported his gun had been stolen while he was in the washroom at Philadelphia Airport. The unidentified pilot had cleared security and made the restroom stop on the way to his flight when the theft occurred. The airport was searched and witnesses interviewed, and it was […]

An integral part of the various jobs I’ve held for the last 37 years has involved reviewing aircraft accident reports and looking at data generated from them. During that time, what the NTSB euphemistically refers to as “maneuvering,” has remained in the top three causes of fatal accidents with usually about 40 percent of general […]

The Arizona flight school where Andreas Lubitz took primary flight training may face one of the massive lawsuits that will flow from the young Germanwings pilot’s intentional crash of an A320 in the French Alps last year. Lubitz took his primary flight training at Lufthansa’s Airline Training Center in Goodyear, near Phoenix. According to the […]