Flight Safety

The AOPA Air Safety Institute released a new online course Friday designed to help pilots transition into unfamiliar aircraft. “Transitioning to Other Airplanes” offers factors to consider when moving up or down in airplane size or complexity, or into one with different avionics. The first ten hours of flight in an unfamiliar airplane pose more […]

Airlines around the world said Thursday they’ll start requiring two crew members in the cockpit at all times. The change comes after details emerged that the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 deliberately locked the captain outside the cockpit and crashed the jet into the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all aboard. Norwegian Air Shuttle announced […]

Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilotfound to have deliberately crashed the Germanwings Airbus 320 into the French Alps this week, was undergoing treatment for depression but concealed his condition from the airline, according to a Wall Street Journal reportFriday that quoted unnamed sources.A search of Lubitz’s Dusseldorf home turned up torn-up medical leave notes excusing him from […]

At a congressional hearing in Washington on Tuesday, advocates cited issues with unstable funding, aging infrastructure and inadequate staffing for critical air traffic control functions, and lobbied for fundamental change in how the FAA is managed and funded. Paul Rinaldi, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, told the House aviation subcommittee that “the […]

A German Airbus 320 is down in a mountainous region of southern France, and all144 passengers and 6 crewon board are believed to be dead, officials announced early Tuesday morning. The airplane was en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf and was operated by Germanwings, a low-cost subsidiary of Lufthansa. Early reports said a mayday call […]

ORD TRACON was pretty busy last night, so we had to wait to check in for a couple of minutes. Just ahead of us, we heard TRACON issue an airliner a warning about an unauthorized laser illumination event: TRACON:“Airline XXX, unauthorized laser illumination event at 0035Z, ten miles west of PWK, reported at 7,000 feet […]

 A helicopter pilot is dead but occupants of a house in Orlando, Florida, escaped injury after the aircraft crashed into an adjoining guesthouse on Sunday afternoon. Police told local media the Robinson R-44 helicopter ended up inside the guest house and the pilot’s body was recovered after a fire was put out. “We don’t […]

Amazon, which is developing drones to make package deliveries, received its long-awaited experimental airworthiness certificatefrom the FAAon Thursday. The approval allows Amazon to test its unmanned aerial systems in the U.S. while proposed commercial drone regulations await the rulemaking process. The certificate, requested by Amazon in July, allows the company to make flights no higher […]

The federal employee whose drone crashed on the White House lawn in January won’t be charged by prosecutors, but the FAA will continue to investigate the incident, The Associated Press reported Wednesday. Shawn Usman, an employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was flying a borrowed DJI quadcopter in the early hours of Jan. 26 when […]

Not long ago, an airline began to receive notices that crews flying the RNAV (GPS) RWY 36 approach into Birmingham, Alabama (BHM) were receiving GPWS alerts while descending from the MDA to the runway. Since it wasn’t an isolated incident, the airline suspected that the approach was flawed and notified the FAA, who flight checked […]