News

A rudder pedal jam may have led to the fatal crash of former U.S. Aerobatics Champion Vicki Cruse during qualifying for the world championships in England last year. The British Air Accidents Investigations Branch says it also can’t rule out pilot incapacitation as a contributing factor in the accident. The AAIB report (PDF) says Cruse […]

Zimbabwe’s national airline has fired all of its pilots after they ignored a Friday deadline to end their strike. Air Zimbabwe pilots stopped flying Wednesday to pressure the cash-strapped airline into restoring full monthly salaries of $2,500 a month. Wages were cut in half in February. The BBC reported the airline says it doesn’t have […]

When an unmanned Navy helicopter disregarded its directions and errantly flew toward the U.S. capital last month it may have validated the concerns of many pilots, but it immediately engaged military officials who had pressing decisions to make. The Aug. 2 incident put a runaway MQ-8B Fire Scout over populated areas near busy airspace. The […]

New rules (PDF) proposed by the FAA to manage pilot fatigue were announced Friday; they provide limits on duty time of any kind, provide 30 consecutive hours weekly of time off and attempt to guarantee at least eight hours sleep between shifts. The new requirements aim to create a single consistent rule that “would eliminate […]

The coming departure of Mayor Richard Daley from Chicago has some aviators hoping the window has opened for a return of Meigs Field to Chicago, although there’s currently no hard evidence to support that hope. Meigs Field was rendered unusable in the early hours of March 30, 2003, when Mayor Daley sent heavy construction equipment […]

A lawsuit brought by a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and four others that sought to hold Jeppesen Dataplan Inc responsible for aiding the CIA in flying them to secret interrogation sites was dismissed Wednesday by an appeals court. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco “reluctantly concluded” in a 6-5 vote that the […]

Cirrus CEO Brent Wouters confirmed that a delegation of potential investors from China visited the company’s Duluth facilities last week but he said it’s not the first and probably won’t be the last time the company has hosted foreign capitalists. “We have been very open that we are looking for capital,” Wouters told AVweb. “We […]

Recent crashes in Alaska have illustrated the limits of current search-and-rescue technology that depends on ELT signals, according to a story in Monday’s Alaska Dispatch. The Otter that crashed last month, killing former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens and four others, carried a new-generation 406 MHz emergency locator transmitter, but the force of the crash separated […]

The developers of the Transition folding-wing roadable aircraft are preparing a 19,000-square-foot. facility in Woburn, Mass., for low-volume production to begin as early as late 2011. The company is currently working on construction of two of its newly redesigned vehicles, which will serve as road test and light sport aircraft certification flight test vehicles, respectively. […]

The NTSB last month asked regulators to require children to have their own seats and seat belts, but the FAA squashed that idea back in 2005, citing statistical data, and may do so again. The new call (specific to commercial aircraft, though relevant to small aircraft) is tied to a March 2009 crash of a […]