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Reaction To Change At The Top? Sometimes it takes a little while for a head-office personnel shuffle to sink in but apparently not at New Piper. The Vero Beach plant was evacuated Tuesday after receiving a bomb threat. The threat came a day after CEO Chuck Suma was shifted to the position of Vice Chairman […]

FAA spokesman Greg Martin said the Federal Register document is a continuation of the process started with a forum held earlier this year in which stakeholder groups were asked to come up with alternative methods of funding the FAA. He said there’s a genuine desire on the part of the FAA to design a funding […]

AOPA spokesman Chris Dancy said the document is of “grave concern” to the pilot group and could result in a nationwide mobilization of its 400,000 members to protest. “We’re working very hard on this issue. It is our number one issue,” Dancy said. AOPA has been vocally opposing any talk of user fees since before […]

FAA Asks For Industry Input The FAA says its main funding source, the Airport and Airway Trust Fund, is going broke and now is the time to start fixing it — and it appears at least part of the solution will be found in pilots’ wallets. Earlier this week, various industry groups, from pilots associations […]

The FAA said on Friday that all airports in the region are operating, with the exception of New Orleans Lakefront Airport, which was still under water. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport (MSY) and Stennis International Airport in Bay St. Louis, Miss., are open only to relief efforts, and several other fields are restricted to […]

Despite beauracratic obstacles, hundreds of volunteer pilots and their GA aircraft are contributing to the relief effort. Civil Air Patrol pilots who live in Mississippi fly all day and return at night to homes damaged by the storm. “These people have drawn on some inner strength to get the job done,” says Maj. Owen Younger, […]

Crews Frustrated Many who are trying to offer help to the devastated Gulf region are still grounded. Dr. Aziz Kamali, a family practitioner in Stockton, Calif., mobilized a volunteer group of 20 nurses willing to donate 7 to 10 days of vacation time to help out. Angel Flight America is ready and willing to fly […]

“U.S. pilots don’t appreciate how good life is to them,” CFI Juergen Boettcher wrote to AVweb last week. “In Germany we are presently paying more than $9 per gallon of avgas. Most of that is taxes, of course.” Another way to look at the price hike is as just one factor in overall operating costs. […]

$1-Per-Gallon Hikes Not Unusual The bad news is, you’ve likely seen the price of avgas zipping upward in the last two weeks, but the good news is, that upward trend seems to have topped out, and by the end of last week many prices were starting to backslide a bit. Paulo Santos, who has been […]

But over the weekend, a former airline pilot in Europe expressed concern about threats to that first-world safety record. “The commercial pressures on the shoulders of pilots have increased enormously,” Filip van Rossum wrote in the Belgian newspaper Het Nieuwsblad. New rules passed in the European Union this year require airlines to compensate passengers for […]