leadnews

Advice: Check Before Flight… Since Sept. 1, it’s been legal to fly as a Sport Pilot, but if you do, are you insured? “Don’t assume that because you have coverage to fly as a Private Pilot, you’ll be insured if you fly as a Sport Pilot,” Bob Mackey, a vice president with Falcon Insurance Agency, […]

FAA chief spokesman Greg Martin said the letter contained “troubling charges” but declined to comment on specific allegations. He did say many of the more general observations are well-known to the agency. He noted that in House testimony in June, the agency reported that air traffic controllers used more than 100 percent of their sick […]

In her letter, Jane alleges that ample staff members are available to handle the workload at her tower considering the number who are on breaks at any given time. She alleges that in an eight-hour shift most controllers will put in no more than four hours “on position.” She also claims that management has virtually […]

NATCA Declines Comment On Whistle Blower’s Charges The National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) is emphatically declining comment on an anonymousletter sent to AVweb from an air traffic controller, challenging the union’s contention that air safety is being jeopardized by a staff shortage throughout the system. AVweb sent a copy of the detailed missive to […]

Although the NTSB has issued only preliminary findings on an Aug. 3, 2004, crash that killed six people near Austin, Texas, The Oklahoman has revealed that the pilot was appealing an FAA suspension at the time of the crash. According to the paper, Richard Allen Fisher’s ticket was pulled for 240 days by the FAA […]

Now, Alaska doesn’t have a monopoly on questionable pilot decision making. As AVweb reported in 2003, the NTSB found that pilot Robert A. Monaco, of Lexington, Mass., had a cocktail of very potent drugs in his system when the Beech B200 he was flying hit a building a mile short of the Fitchburg (Mass.) Municipal […]

Bush Pilot Syndrome Tackled… Alaska has always led the nation in per capita aviation crashes and fatalities and, for the most part, with good reasons like awful weather, poor nav aids and primitive airports. Some technical advances (and some pretty expensive ones at that) like the Capstone project and the installation of lighting and weather […]

Liberty Aircraft’s headquarters and assembly plant is in Melbourne and a contingency plan went into effect there on Wednesday. President Tony Tiarks told Kern, from a hotel in Orlando on Sunday, that they protected the business as well as possible. “We’ve made three copies of our software and they are in safe places, even out […]

Pilots Flee Frances… It looks like airplanes and airports will weather Hurricane Frances a lot better than they did Hurricane Charley but that doesn’t mean things are terribly pleasant in Florida at the moment. If Charley hit like a set of brass knuckles, Frances is more like a big wet sponge, dropping up to 11 […]

EAA’s Lawrence told AVweb the real impact of the new rule won’t start to be felt until about six months from now, when the standards and policies spawned by its enactment start coming into play. Although manufacturers and groups representing sport-aviation interests have been meeting for two years to create the manufacturing, maintenance and flight-training […]