News

New Orleans Lakefront Airport, from which NBAA decided to move its 2008 convention, has been lacking an operating control tower (with one 10-day exception surrounding the Sugar Bowl) since Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. That, despite the FAA’s announced commitment to Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., that a mobile control tower would be put in place, […]

The National Business Aviation Association and the Flight Safety Foundation reacted last week to a decision by Brazilian criminal authorities to assign criminal responsibilities to the pilots of the Legacy business jet prior to the conclusion of the accident investigation. The jet survived airborne contact, in September of 2006, with a Gol Airlines 737 that […]

A leading provider of simulation technology and integrated training services, CAE will on June 7 open a new six-simulator training center in Whippany, N.J. (near Morristown Airport). The CAE SimuFlite North East Training Center will now offer training for the new Dassault Falcon 7X aircraft, Falcon 900EX EASy, Gulfstream IV and Sikorsky S-76. The FAA-approved, […]

Gulfstream Aerospace has signed on for two nine-year leases for building space that will accommodate the new Gulfstream Research and Development Center II near the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport, adjacent to the company’s current R&D center. The new facilities can provide working space for up to 550 employees (in an office building) and 150 employees […]

Midcoast Aviation, a private jet completion and refurbishing company, is responding to a growing business jet market (and an accompanying recent-year revenue surge of roughly 20 percent per year) through a $17.5 million expansion and the hiring of additional workers. The company’s St. Louis Downtown Airport headquarters will see the addition of a new 125,000-square-foot […]

Before DayJet begins the first very light jet air-taxi service this summer in Florida using Eclipse 500s, company President and CEO Ed Iacobucci wants to clear up some myths about the air-taxi industry. “The biggest misconception is that the air-taxi model is about the airplane,” he said Tuesday at a VLJ conference in West Palm […]

SATSair and Linear Air believe that they have proven the air-taxi model using the Cirrus SR22 and Cessna Caravan, respectively. “Air taxis are a big opportunity,” Bill Herp, Linear Air’s president and CEO, said at the Business Models for VLJs and Light Jets Conference in West Palm Beach, Fla. SATSair President and CEO Steve Hanvey, […]

An amendment striking user fees from the Senate’s FAA reauthorization bill (S. 1300, introduced May 3) has yesterday been introduced by Senators Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and John Sununu, R-N.H. Currently, the funding bill seeks to establish a $25 per-flight user fee for turbine operations, according to NBAA. Language in the proposed amendment would remove the […]

Last week Cirrus issued a mandatory Service Bulletin that requires the replacement of some control system parts that, in specific cross control circumstances, can cause the rudder and aileron controls to jam. The Service Bulletin was issued a month after the controls jammed on a relatively new SR20 as a student pilot was lining up […]

The FAA is painting a dismal picture of its own performance in an unvarnished attempt to gather support for its controversial proposed aviation user-fee funding system. In a fact sheet released last week, the agency ties the funding package directly to modernization of airspace management, which has been nicknamed NextGen. The Administrations NextGen Financing Reform […]