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The report makes no mention of Flight 587, which crashed in New York in 2001, killing a total of 265 people, but Forbes.com said the recommendations grew out of that investigation. In the New York disaster, the aircraft entered a series of rapid oscillations after hitting the wake turbulence of a Boeing 747 shortly after […]

Travel Limiter Modifications Needed… Airbus says it agrees with an NTSB recommendation that the rudder-control system on A300-600 aircraft be modified to prevent the kind of circumstances that sent an American Airlines flight tumbling briefly out of control over Florida in 1997. The NTSB is urging the FAA to issue an Airworthiness Directive for Airbus […]

Meanwhile, New Piper is whittling down the number of aircraft that are grounded as it identifies those that contain parts made from the defective steel. The company originally issued a Mandatory Service Bulletin grounding 76 aircraft built since mid-January. Of those, 39 had been delivered to customers. Spokesman Mark Miller said that by last Friday, […]

Wilco sent the steel to Certified Steel Treating in Los Angeles at New Piper’s request. When steel is normalized, an independent lab must test it — the results are returned with the shipment. Nelson said all the paperwork was in order for the steel order, which was then forwarded to Piper. He confirmed that all […]

Weak Steel Might Have Gone To Other Manufacturers… The FAA has confirmed it’s investigating whether defective heat-treated steel found in dozens of New Piper aircraft made its way to other manufacturers. “It’s something we are definitely looking into,” FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen told AVweb. She said there is no evidence to date that the issue […]

Once the Rotax was running, it pulled the two aircraft up at a rate of about 450 fpm from the 12,000-foot-high base camp. There was a lot of circling involved in getting up to the height of Everest and enjoy the minus 40-degrees Centigrade temperatures. At times, Meredith-Hardy noticed that D’Arrigo was being “bounced around” […]

A Wing, Plenty Of Prayers?… So, what would you do if the turbo-intercooled Rotax 914 engine powering your Pegasus Quantum trike, flying under a Pegasus XL wing, was so hard to start that it flattened two batteries before finally catching? Perhaps they were mildly hypoxic, but Angelo D’Arrigo and Richard Meredith-Hardy chose to fly that […]

While safety was the prime motivation of Capstone, it has had some operational benefits as well. For instance, the use of GPS instrument approaches at remote airfields has greatly improved the reliability of air service to those communities. “At villages where Capstone has created instrument approaches, the fraction of time weather makes air travel unavailable […]

Meanwhile, the life expectancy of some Alaska bush pilots is increasing thanks to a technological battle against the high accident rate there (2.5 times higher than the lower 48). The Capstone Project — which has fitted aircraft operating in the mountainous, weather-ravaged and isolated area of southeast Alaska known as the YK Delta with GPS, […]

FAA May Be Challenging NTSB Report… The FAA appears to be challenging an NTSB report that points the finger at air traffic control for a fatal accident in California two weeks ago. The NTSB findings on the crash of a Piper PA-44-180 near Julian, Calif., read: “The airplane descended to 5,200 feet in response to […]