News

Murray Smith, the founder and publisher of Professional Pilot Magazine, died Christmas Day at the age of 89. Smith launched the magazine in 1966 and focused on issues that mattered to pilots, managers and dispatchers. It regularly surveyed its readership on issues affecting the broad range of commercial aviation. Smith had stepped back from day-to-day […]

The Canadian Owners and Pilots Association (COPA) is calling on aircraft operators to oppose a 10 percent “luxury tax” on personal aircraft (also boats and cars) worth more than $100,000 CAD (about $75,000 USD), proposed as part of the newly elected government’s financial plan. The proposal was announced as a campaign promise in October and […]

When the Cirrus first appeared 25 years ago, one of its safety features was a split-incidence, stall resistant wing. Yet the airplane still has a stall accident pattern and one that has a twist: Many of the stalls occur on go-arounds. In this, the fourth in our five-part podcast series on stall awareness and prevention, […]

Orville Wright is missing and the National Parks Service (NPS) wants him back. A copper reproduction of a bust of one of the founding fathers of aviation as we know it was stolen from the Wright Brothers Monument on Big Kill Devil Hill overnight Saturday or Sunday morning. The heavy granite base was toppled and […]

For the want of an appropriately sized paper coffee cup and lid (sorry, Ben), likely tens of thousands of dollars and at least one day at the beach were lost by those affected by a mid-Atlantic diversion of Condor A330 earlier this year. The inconvenient chain of events damaged the airplane and disrupted the travel […]

The former chief technical pilot on the Boeing 737 MAX has invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to turn over documents subpoenaed by the Justice Department as part of its broad investigation into the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Mark Forkner played a key role in the development of the aircraft and worked for […]

The Navy is investigating a landing mishap on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that caused more than $2 million in damage to the aircraft and four others on the deck. The Navy Times says an E-2D Advanced Hawkeye missed all four arrestment wires and made “slight contact” with two F/A-18 EF Super Hornets during the […]

A couple of commercial space launch companies are steering clear of bringing their boosters back to Earth under their own power and are instead borrowing a technique from the dawn of space exploitation. Wired says United Launch Alliance and small-launch provider Rocket Lab plan to grab their boosters out of the air with helicopters as […]

Boeing is fundamentally redesigning the software architecture of the 737 MAX flight control system to take data from both of the system’s computers and to compare the data from the sensors feeding them. The existing system uses data from only one flight control computer and the second serves as a backup. In the new setup, […]

Canadian authorities appear to have a well-documented and recorded case of hypoxia in their investigation of the stall/spin fatal accident involving a Piper Navajo a year ago. On Aug. 1, 2018, an Aries Aviation PA-31, a well-maintained aircraft regularly flown by experienced pilots, inexplicably spun into a 10,000-foot mountain peak while on initial descent to […]