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Alaskan Prices Highest In Country… The one state likely doing the highest percentage of general aviation flying per resident is also paying the most for general aviation fuel. “With the gas prices, oh, man, it’s a sore subject,” Matt Smith, of Anchorage’s Aero Tech Flight Services, told The Anchorage Daily News. As often seems to […]

Meanwhile, the Forest Service wasted little time getting the five heavy tankers it now has back in its arsenal back to work. Within a few days of the P-3 Orions from Aero Union Corp. being given the go-ahead to fly, two of them were used to battle a blaze threatening a telescope in Arizona. The […]

Aero Tech has been promoting the A-10 tanker concept for almost 10 years but the recent grounding of 33 large air tankers by the Forest Service gave new impetus to the proposal and the company prepared a brief for western governors. One of the biggest stumbling blocks appears to be freeing up a couple of […]

Surplus A-10s Suggested As Tankers… There’s nothing like a little adversity to inspire innovation and a California company says it has part of the solution to the problem of aging large air tankers. Aero Tech Ltd. has been trying to convince California authorities and the U.S. Air Force to test A-10 attack aircraft as medium-sized […]

The FAA last week told AVweb that it would be premature to comment in detail on the NTSB recommendation, because they had not yet had time to review it. “What we can say, is that we’ll look at this seriously, as we do with all NTSB recommendations,” said FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto. “We implement a […]

Concerns Over CO In The Cockpit… When the NTSB late last month asked the FAA to consider making CO detectors mandatory in GA aircraft, AOPA’s Air Safety Foundation (ASF) was quick to respond, saying that such a requirement is not necessary. “We found just 10 accidents caused by CO poisoning in fixed-wing singles since 1993 […]

In March of 2002 and April of 2003, Proteus (a Scaled Composites design) flew as a NASA test-bed for UAV see-and-avoid technology with success. In 2002, the equipment (a Goodrich Skywatch HP Traffic Advisory System) sensed transponder-equipped aircraft and directed Proteus to avoid them. In the later tests an Amphitech OASys 35-Ghz primary radar system […]

Collision-avoidance concerns underwent an extensive review prior to deployment, and precautions are in place, U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Roger Maier told AVweb last week. The approval process requires that the UAV operator satisfy the FAA that the UAV provides an “equivalent level of safety” compared to a manned aircraft. The UAVs now are flying pre-programmed […]

UAVs And You… When the U.S. Border Patrol began late last month to fly two Hermes 450 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to help patrol the Arizona-Mexico border, the deployment raised questions about collision avoidance. “UAVs pose a significant threat to air traffic along and near the border,” one AVweb reader, a professional pilot based in […]

The irony is that even as airports grow more and more congested, GA airports around the country are being shut down, victims of rising development pressures and neighborhood complaints. But in one small town in Michigan, champagne corks were popping last week after a judge’s decision saved Wilderness Airpark, near Kent City. The airpark’s only […]