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By March 20, air traffic facilities that want to continue to use taxi-into-position-and-hold (TIPH) need to notify the FAA, spokeswoman Laura Brown told AVweb on Tuesday. They don’t have to eliminate the procedure. “They can keep using it,” she said. But they will have to conduct a safety analysis to show it can be used […]

Transportation Norm Mineta added fuel to the fire on Tuesday morning when he emphatically told a House Appropriations Committee that no user fees on GA are under consideration (see AOPA’s Web site for a video of his statement). Questions were raised at yesterday’s press conference — whether he meant piston aircraft only, as opposed to […]

Congress must continue to have authority over the FAA, user fees must be avoided, and the general public — which benefits in broad ways from a robust aviation system — must continue to fund at least 25 to 30 percent of the FAA budget. So decreed Ed Bolen, president of the National Business Aviation Association […]

As AVweb reported on Thursday, the nation’s airlines have agreed to a user-fee formula that they’ll be using to lobby the FAA and Congress in a bid to reduce their own costs. And if the FAA (and the White House) are already leaning in the user-fee direction, that leaves GA as a voice in the […]

As David Crowe’s Eclipse 500 was beginning life, there were some furrowed brows in Washington wondering what his future flying activity, and that of thousands of others in the very light jet (VLJ) fraternity, will do to (or for) the aviation industry. “We’re on the cusp of a new business model,” FAA planner Nana Shellaberger […]

Eclipse spokesman Andrew Broom told reporters that by 2008 the company should be stir-welding about 1,000 of the six-place twinjets each year (the order book is now 2,400 strong) to fill a demand that could see 15,000 very light jets (VLJs) in the air by the end of the decade. “It depends on what the […]

The very first customer who will fly away an Eclipse (no, it’s not Bill Gates) took a personal interest in the creation of his airplane in a ceremony at the company’s Albuquerque headquarters late last week. David Crowe, described only as a pilot and businessman, started the friction stir welding machine as it began work […]

If anything positive (for GA) results from this process, it will be that all the stakeholders will better understand each other’s realities and goals and that should lead to some streamlining of the operational aspects of the new zone. That may mean adding capacity to the Potomac TRACON to deal specifically with the extra workload […]

The permanent zone that will likely result from all this is almost certain to be round, or close to it. The current “Mickey Mouse ears” shape of the ADIZ invites navigational error and also makes it tough on those monitoring the airspace. Just how big the circle should be is another matter. GA proponents say […]

The overwhelming sentiment of more than 20,000 written comments and dozens of personal presentations at two public meetings is that the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) surrounding Washington, D.C., is an operational, legal, safety and economic boondoggle that does almost nothing to enhance security and therefore should be scrapped. Well, that isn’t going to happen. […]