Flight Safety

Last July, an FAA spokesperson gave stunning testimony before Congress-she said that the FAA was going to miss its December 2015 deadline for the rewrite of FAR Part 23 to simplify small aircraft certification by at least two years. As would be expected, the aviation community expressed its fury. Members of Congress sent letters to […]

Its never good when a general aviation accident leads the evening news, but that was the case Friday when a TBM 900 became a ghost flight off the South Carolina coast and continued south before crashing in the water off Jamaica early in the afternoon. As we reported, the TBM departed Rochester, New York on […]

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 […]

In its weekly perusal of developments in aviation, AVweb’s staff turned up news of an expansion of SocialFlight, insurance benefits for customers of Crosswind Concepts, the annual convention of the Silver Wings Fraternity and certification of Piper’s M-Class airplanes in China. SocialFlight, a web and mobile app for finding events and interesting places to fly, […]

A new Airworthiness Directive (AD) will require initial and repetitive borescope inspections of some 300 PT6A engines and potentially cost operators as much as $18,106,200. Following reports of compressor turbine (CT) blade failures causing engine power loss, the FAA issued an AD Wednesday that requires replacement of blades that fail inspection with a newly developed […]

AVweb’s weekly look at the aviation activities on SocialFlight uncovered everything from an Aire Faire at Bonne Terre through a Horse Bend Festival, a Display Day and a Wings N’ Wheels celebration. The Bonne Terre Aire Festival is taking place on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 6 and 7, at the Bonne Terre, Missouri Airport. From […]

Amazon, Google and plenty of others are eager to use drones; the FAA is facing a deadline to allow them into the airspace; pilots are worried about how this will affect them — and amid all this worrying, NASA scientists are working on new technology that could solve the problem. The solution, says NASA’s Parimal […]

All five people on board a Piper PA-46 Malibu died when it crashed on Sunday, shortly before noon, near the Erie Municipal Airport in Colorado, about 25 miles northwest of Denver. Peter Knudson, spokesman for the NTSB, said the airplane had taken off from Centennial Airport, south of Denver, and was attempting to land when […]

Last Friday, we departed Detroit City VFR northbound in my SR22 for some sightseeing and requested traffic advisories from Selfridge Approach. Shortly thereafter, we heard this exchange: Selfridge Approach:“Cessna XXX, traffic at one o’clock and two miles. A whacko.” Then a brief pause. Selfridge:“Correction: That’s a ‘Waco.’” Cessna XXX:“Maybe he’s both!” Brian Litch

Logbooks as a means of preserving precious memories of flight are way overrated because most of us just jot down the basics, rarely making note of how scared, excited or inspired we were by a particular flight or lesson. So even if I could find my first logbook, it would be of no use in […]