News

For 2009, the National Aviation Hall of Fame will induct astronauts Eileen Collins, the late Edward White and movie legend the late Jimmy Stewart, alongside Russ Meyer, who led Cessna Aircraft as chairman and CEO from 1975 to 2003. Cessna had halted production of its piston-powered aircraft amid liability issues that held the manufacturer responsible […]

Boeing has scrubbed its schedule for the production of its all-composite 787 Dreamliner as it works to reinforce the aircraft’s wing section while customers have scrubbed orders for about 72 of the jets this year, including 15 dropped by Qantas last week. Still the order book for the untested, unfinished aircraft stands at roughly 850 […]

The BEA Interim Report (PDF) released Thursday covering the crash of Air France Flight 447 shows a span of more than nine hours between the last message received from the flight’s crew and the launch of a first rescue aircraft. Though communications on oversea flights can be sparse, the rescue launch order was still a […]

The FAA is nearing completion of a hardware update that “virtualizes” its flight plan infrastructure. The new National Airspace Data Interchange Network (NADIN) will soon be fully integrated, helping process the more than 1.5 million messages that are part of the national traffic system each day. In the new system, both general aviation and airline […]

The FAA is working with several specialized aviation groups to create terrain-awareness simulation training to improve air tour safety in Alaska and Hawaii. The training would target new commercial pilots flying air tour routes and involves visual cue-based simulator training to acclimate new air tour pilots with their route of flight under various meteorological conditions […]

Investigators said Thursday that Air France 447 apparently didn’t break up in flight but fell belly first into the equatorial Atlantic early on the morning of June 1. Thus far, 51 bodies of the 228 people aboard the Airbus 330 have been recovered and the search for additional victims ended last Friday. The search for […]

The NTSB said this week it is investigating two runway incursions that occurred in June at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport in Cleveland, Ohio, while a controller-in-training was directing the airplanes. On June 26, an ExpressJet Embraer 145, was cleared by the controller to cross Runway 24L at a taxiway in order to depart from Runway […]

A new grass runway is now being built on land owned by the U.S. Forest Service in Montana, after four years of effort by recreational pilots. The strip, which is expected to be ready for next spring, will be 4,000 feet long, stretching across a meadow at an elevation 6,300 feet, surrounded by plenty of […]

Two active pilots — Jason Schappert, a CFI living in Florida, and Vincent Lambercy, a Swiss private pilot living in Germany — were chatting on Twitter recently when they came up with an exciting idea. Why not go flying in Jason’s Cessna 150, from the U.S. East Coast to the West Coast and back, to […]

Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo, also known as “Mothership Eve,” was on its way from Scaled Composites in Mojave to fly past the groundbreaking ceremony for Spaceport America in New Mexico on June 19 when the crew noted the failure of a speedbrake actuator as they descended toward the site. Pilot Peter Siebold and his crew made […]