News

On July 28, a Piaggio Avanti operated by Avantair flew two legs (one with passengers) without a left elevator, and now the company has grounded its entire fleet as it works with the FAA through a safety review. Avantair is based out of St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport, Florida, and operates almost 60 Piaggio Avanti turboprop […]

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau got a grilling before the Australian Senate this week over its investigatory work into the 2009 ditching of a Westwind medical flight off Norfolk Island. The bureau and Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority were castigated by witnesses for taking too long to complete the report (more than 1000 days), with […]

The NTSB is seeking response within 90 days to ten new safety recommendations (five for the FAA, three for the Flight Test Safety Committee, and two for Gulfstream) born from the April 2, 2011, fatal crash of an experimental Gulfstream GVI (G650). The test aircraft went down near Roswell, N.M., during the final stages of […]

“Treacherous missions are not at the root of a stubbornly persistent helicopter accident rate and helicopter fatalities,” the International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) said Wednesday, after four flights in eight days resulted in seven fatalities. Each of the four accident flights from Oct. 10 to Oct. 17 appear to have initiated as normal general aviation/private […]

With this week’s news that Apple we release the iPad Mini on Nov. 2, aviation app providers are almost certain to see increased sales as a result. “After every new Apple device release, we’ve always seen a wave of new pilots and new customers. There’s always a group of pilots waiting to see what new […]

The departure of Rod Hightower on Monday from the helm of EAA doesn’t signal any major change in the direction of the organization, chairman of the board Jack Pelton told AVweb on Wednesday. “This all happened kind of quickly and unexpectedly,” Pelton said. “We’re still focused on our core mission, which is supporting our EAA […]

As the FAA faces a challenging deadline to integrate unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace by 2015, probably the biggest challenge is to ensure collision avoidance. This week, an engineering company in Maryland says it has successfully tested an ADS-B-based, fully autonomous collision avoidance system on a UAS. The test by R3 Engineering took […]

FAA budget cutbacks are almost certain to directly impact the industry next, according to General Aviation Manufacturers Association President Pete Bunce. “The world will be different starting next year,” Bunce told participants Tuesday at Red Bird Simulations’ second annual flight training industry conference in San Marcos, Texas. “There will be cuts made,” he added, explaining […]

After a year of research and training at its San Marcos, Texas, Skyport simulator lab, Redbird Flight Simulations is poised to roll out a new simulator-based pilot training program that expands its business beyond sim sales and into the wider market of flight training delivery. The training could, in some iterations, be based on a […]