News

Richard “Dick” Taylor, known for his decades of work on jet designs, died earlier this month at 93 at his home in Seattle. He was a test pilot and later director of engineering for Boeing, where his portfolio included the B-29 tanker, the B-47, B-52 and later, the 737. The Seattle Times noted that Taylor […]

A nonprofit corporation with a long history of developing new technology (it made the first nuclear rods, invented the foundation technology of the CD) has come up with a way to harmlessly disable drones that are flying where they aren’t supposed to be flying. The Battelle Memorial Institute has come up with a gun-like radio […]

SkyPan International, the drone operator that was fined $1.9 million this month by the FAA for aerial photography flights, maintains it has always operated legally and safely. In a response to the FAA’s charges that it conducted unauthorized flights in New York and Chicago between March 2012 and December 2014, SkyPan says it “operates only […]

The FAA is too slow to hire and train new air traffic controllers, NATCA said this week, and the result is that towers and centers across the country are chronically understaffed. Controllers are repeatedly working six-day weeks at TRACON facilities in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and New York, according to NATCA. “Bureaucratic inertia” is […]

An airplane crashed into a mobile home in a trailer park in Lake Worth, Florida, on Tuesday evening, sparking an intense fire that destroyed the building and the airplane, according to the FAA. At a Wednesday morning news conference, FAA officials said the Piper Cherokee 180, with only its owner on board, had taken off […]

A young pilot took some major steps toward his dream of flying for a living by earning three individual pilot certificates and two type ratings, all in a 48 hour period. But before Preston Allen, a 24-year-old private pilot with 1,200 hours, could earn each piece of paper, he had to crack the books. “He’s […]

The latest in what seems to be a serial pattern of freeway landings happened in Boise, Idaho, on Tuesday and it seems to have been the result of fuel mismanagement. A Cessna 210 made a belly landing on I-84, the main route through Idaho’s largest city, after the engine quit on approach to the Boise […]

The NTSB will hold a safety forum this week on “Humans and Hardware,” from 9 to 5 Eastern Time on Wednesday, to address loss of control, which is the number-one cause of fatal crashes in fixed-wing general aviation aircraft. The event will be streamed live online at the NTSB website. The forum will comprise four […]

A sophisticated missile made in Russia and launched from a rebel-held region of Ukraine brought down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which crashedin July 2014, according to the final report by the Dutch Safety Board. The report (PDF),which was made public today, says the Boeing 777 was cruising at 33,000 feet on a flight from Amsterdam […]

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology say they have discovered a fuel additive that could reduce the intensity of jet-fuel-fed explosions when airplanes crash. The additive has no adverse affect on fuel performance, according to the team’s preliminary results. The additive, created by a team headed by Julia Kornfield, professor of chemical engineering, is […]