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The FAA is working to redesign the airspace in the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia area, and has asked for comments on four potential plans that it says would improve safety, reduce delays and handle growing air traffic. The four alternatives under consideration are Future No Action, Modifications to Existing Airspace, Ocean Routing Airspace, and Integrated Airspace […]

The FAA has established a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) to accommodate unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) flights by the U.S. Customs Border Patrol near Nogales, Ariz., along the Mexican border. “The unexpected, immediate implementation of this TFR raises concerns that the FAA and the Department of Homeland Security have not taken into consideration the impact that […]

Airspace Struggles, East And West This afternoon, the FAA will hold the first of two public meetings on its proposal to make the ADIZ over the D.C. area into a permanent fixture. The proposal so far has drawn over 19,700 comments, so the agency is sure to have plenty of input. Today’s meeting, at the […]

The FAA took the action because of the failure of some 30 installed cylinders due to metal fatigue. ECi asked for the AD to allow affected cylinder assemblies to be removed at the normal engine operating time-between-overhaul, but the FAA stuck with its 800-hour limit. “The failure data records show that a longer operating time […]

ECi Cylinders The FAA has issued an Airworthiness Directive (AD) that requires the replacement of certain ECi “Classic Cast” cylinder assemblies installed on Lycoming 320-, 360-, and 540-series parallel valve engines. The cylinders are found in more than 1,500 engines in the U.S., and must be replaced within 800 hours of time in service. Replacing […]

The FAA’s position stopped Stanwyck dead in his tracks for a couple of years but he didn’t stop thinking. That eventually led to him design a system that can transcribe data captured from the UHF radio signal that some AWOS and ASOS stations emit and then put it up on the net. It works, but […]

Stanwyck said his software is designed to interface with any of the more than 1,500 AWOS and ASOS installations across the country by plugging into already-existing data ports. But the FAA won’t let him physically attach anything to the equipment, saying it is proprietary and he must have written permission from the companies that manufactured […]

Hurdles For Small Aviation Business What if you built a better mousetrap but government regulations made the cheese prohibitively expensive? That’s the situation the owner of a small electronics company says he finds himself in as he tries to bring to market what he says is an affordable (about $1,000 per installation), effective and user-friendly […]

If your engine is on the list in the MSB supplement, Lycoming wants you to phone them (570-323-6181) or fax them (570-327-7160) to arrange its return. If your engine was rebuilt or had the crankshaft replaced after March 1, 1999, you need to hunt down the repair records and find the crankshaft serial number to […]

Failure Prompts Yet Another Proposed AD Lycoming is casting its recall net a little wider for engines with potentially faulty crankshafts and the FAA is reinforcing that with yet another proposed AD. Since 2002, Lycoming has replaced hundreds of cranks containing suspected metallurgical faults and now nearly 400 more have been added to the list. […]