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The aircraft will overnight at Madison July 24 and make a scheduled arrival (most likely early afternoon) at AirVenture on opening day. Melvill said they’ll do several passes and possibly an afterburner climb before touching down. It’s not known if any flights will be held during the show but Melvill promised to make a similarly […]

Just Reach Out And Touch It? Make space for EAA AirVenture on your calendar if you want to touch a real spaceship. EAA and Scaled Composites are promising unprecedented access to SpaceShipOne and its mother ship White Knight as the Ansari X-Prize winning combination settles in for the full week of the annual convention in […]

The FAA’s handling of the Cessna twins spar issue has been a bumpy road, with a string of ADs already out, and concern from some owners’ groups over cost and practicality. Bob Vila, president of the Cessna Twins Spar Corporation (CTSC), says the AD could extend to all Cessna twins, and raises issues important to […]

Wing-Spar Cracks Found In Two Aircraft The FAA on Sunday issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive that requires more frequent inspections for wing-spar cracks on twin Cessna 402C and 414A models that have not already been modified with spar straps. Undetected cracks could result in the loss of a wing in flight, the FAA said. The […]

At the opposite end of the capacity debate, the FAA is pushing ahead with plans to close up to 48 towers for five to eight hours late at night and early in the morning when it says controllers have little or nothing to control. As AVweb told you in December, the agency wants to reallocate […]

Now, Senators Hilary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer have jumped into the fray, writing a letter to the FAA pointing out that the agency has pledged to cut flights if it can’t properly staff its control facilities. “It is imperative that our air traffic control facilities are adequately staffed,” Clinton said in a statement released […]

Understaffing Or Bad Blood? Union leaders and politicians say a cut in overtime at the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control center has mushroomed the rate of operational errors (19 in the last month compared to 24 in the previous year) and they’re urging the FAA to relax the restrictions. But it’s also worth noting […]

As crews continued the cleanup in Colorado, the FAA and members of various alphabet groups were meeting to, as NBAA President Ed Bolen put it, “discuss industry involvement in promoting safety.” The meeting was called before the Pueblo crash but was in response to a spate of business aircraft crashes in the last few months. […]

And while ice is widely speculated to have had something to do with the crash of a Cessna Citation 560 in Pueblo, Colo., last Wednesday (freezing drizzle was reported at the time), NTSB Chairwoman Ellen Engleman Connors was more cryptic Thursday. “There were some, shall we say, interesting characteristics” revealed by radar data, she said, […]

FAA Mandates “Tactile” Inspections On Challengers What was a recommendation is now a rule. The FAA has issued an Airworthiness Directive requiring operators (as a revision to the aircraft’s flight manual) to give an extra touch of care when flying in cold weather. Effective this week, operators of Bombardier Challenger 600-series aircraft (including regional jets […]