News

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than it is to be good but the pilot of an aircraft that ditched off Key Largo, Fla., on Thursday seemed to have everything working in his favor. According to a news release, the unidentified pilot’s distress calls were heard by Key West Seaplanes pilots Julie Ann Floyd and […]

A total of nine passengers aboard Asiana Flight 214 that crash-landed in San Francisco on July 6 are suing the airline for damages, but they’re also going after Boeing, claiming the company sells aircraft with different classes of safety. As expected, the suit says Asiana’s crew was negligent when the Boeing 777 they were flying […]

The Rockwell Turbo Commander 690B that crashed into two houses in New Haven, Conn., on Friday was inverted when it hit the homes, the NTSB says. But spokesman Patrick Murray told Reuters the pilot, retired Microsoft vice president Bill Henningsgaard, did not make any distress calls as he turned the aircraft to land in rainy […]

The town of Deer Trail, Colo., Tuesday held a vote on a local ordinance that could financially encourage residents to shoot down UAVs operated over their land by the federal government, but the vote was inconclusive in spite of warnings from the FAA. The ordinance was drafted by a town resident and it would offer […]

Sikorsky hopes its newly unveiled Matrix technology suite can bring higher autonomy to unmanned aviation missions, actively guiding aircraft through dynamically evolving situations that could be dangerous for pilots or impossible for a normal UAV to negotiate. The company describes Matrix as advanced algorithms that collect situational data and effectively make decisions, literally on the […]

A notebook dating back to roughly 1505, filled by Leonardo da Vinci, with his ideas and sketches regarding bird and mechanical flight, will be on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum next month. The book is called the “Codex on the Flight of Birds” and it will be digitized, allowing visitors to […]

Public comments from each agency suggest that Canada’s Transportation Safety Board and Transport Canada may be divided regarding how each would prefer to address the issue of post-crash fires, and those differences have sparked some finger pointing. The Safety Board recently released a report probing an October 2011 crash in which the two pilots of […]

The company is not currently building airplanes, but Mooney had a presence at AirVenture 2013 to recognize the 60-year anniversary of the M20 and two pilots who set records in Mooneys, and to say the company isn’t going anywhere. The company says it is still working to support the roughly 7,000 aircraft it produced that […]

German researchers have developed a system that uses lasers mounted on aircraft to “see” clear air turbulence ahead of the plane. At the German Aerospace Center DLR Institute of Atmospheric physics, researchers have designed a light detection and ranging (LIDAR) instrument for that purpose. It sends a beam of short-wave ultraviolet laser radiation into the […]

The NTSB this week released preliminary aviation accident statistics for 2012, showing that Part 121 commercial airline operations remained fatality-free, and general aviation accidents were virtually unchanged. In the general aviation segment, the number of total accidents was 1,470 in 2011 and 1,471 in 2012. Fatalities decreased slightly, from 448 to 432, and the accident […]