News

Burt Rutan is the 2015 winner of the National Aeronautic Association’s Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy. The trophy is awarded annually to a living American for “significant public service of enduring value to aviation in the United States.” It’s the latest in a long list of awards for the prolific aircraft designer, who retired from Scaled […]

NBAA’s annual business-aviation convention is coming up next month, and retired US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger will be a featured speaker. Sullenberger will talk about aviation safety, leadership and training during the event, taking place Nov. 17 to 19 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Also coming up soon is Redbird’s Migration, held in San Marcos, […]

The FAA has developed a new “compliance philosophy” to promote safety that “challenges the status quo,” the FAA said in a news release on Tuesday. “The Compliance Philosophy is the latest step in the evolution of how we work with those we regulate,” said Administrator Michael Huerta, at a Flight Safety Foundation event in Washington, […]

The FAA on Tuesday announced its largest-ever civil penalty against a drone operator, proposing a fine of $1.9 million against SkyPan International, based in Chicago, for “careless or reckless” operations. The FAA says SkyPan conducted 65 unauthorized commercial drone flights to take aerial photographs in New York and Chicago between March 2012 and December 2014. […]

Fort Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport has been named as the first test facility for the FAA’s new Virtual Air Traffic Control Tower technology, the agency announced last week. Currently, the field is non-towered. The new system, which will be up and running by next summer, is expected to help attract commercial operators to the airport. “The […]

The captain of an American Airlines A320 died during a flight on Monday from Phoenix to Boston, according to an airline official. Few details have been released about the pilot, but officials said the death was due to an illness. The flight diverted to Syracuse, N.Y., and landed shortly after 7 a.m. In a statement […]

A helicopter pilot credited with saving the life of an injured hunter in New Zealand is facing a possible jail sentence because he did the flight with his license suspended for a suspected medical issue. Stuff.co reported Monday that police seized Dave Armstrong’s logbooks after the flight in April of 2014 and now he’s facing […]

China’s largest aviation company says it’s building the first of 50 aviation “industrial bases” aimed at serving the country’s general aviation market. The Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) Chairman Lin Zuoming told the Xinhua News Agency the 30-square-kilometer (11.5-square-mile) complex will include manufacturing, research and training facilities. The groundbreaking for the first one was […]

California Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed a bill that would have made criminals out of those flying drones illegally. The Los Angeles Times reported the bill, which resulted from the grounding of air tankers when hobby drones were spotted near wildfires, seems to have been rejected by Brown for economic and philosophical reasons, saying creating […]

A blue-chip consortium of aircraft manufacturers, aviation groups and associated industry companies and organizations is calling for a global carbon offsetting program to make aviation carbon neutral by 2020 and to “halve aviation’s net emissions by 2050, compared with a 2005 baseline.” At the Global Sustainable Aviation Summit in Geneva last week, the Air Transport […]