Recent Updates

Air traffic continued its eighth year of uninterrupted growth, says Department of Transportation data for the first half of 2017. U.S. airlines carried 414 million travelers in the first six months of 2017—361 million on domestic flights and 54 million on international flights—for growth of 14.7% from a post-recession low in 2008. Load factor—the proportion […]

With the tower at Cyril E. King International Airport in St. Thomas severely damaged by Hurricane Irma, controllers had been left to do their jobs from a tent on the airfield for several days. On Wednesday morning, the FAA activated a mobile control tower that had been flown in on a U.S. Air Force C-17 […]

British Prime Minister Theresa May has appealed directly to U.S. President Donald Trump to intervene in a dispute between Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier and Boeing. Boeingthinks Canadian government subsidies allowed Bombardier to cut an especially sweet deal with Delta for 75 of its new CSeries airliners and lodged a dumping complaint with the U.S. Commerce […]

Airports throughout Florida are reporting varying degrees of damage from Hurricane Irma and the two most familiar to pilots outside the state are cleaning up. Reports out of Sebring Airport are sketchy but it appears the site of the Sport Aviation Expo took a big hit. In email communications with AVweb, officials for the Expo […]

Speculation about the mysterious fatal crash of an aircraft near the secret military test center known as Area 51 in Nevada earlier this month took a sharp left turn this week with several pundits suggesting the aircraft wasn’t American at all. The working theory among the highly specialized military journalists who keep an eye on […]

The CEO of Naples Jet Center at Naples Airport in Florida told AVweb he and everyone else involved in the cleanup after Hurricane Irma are writing a new playbook. “None of us have ever been through anything like this before,” Matt Hagans told AVweb after meeting with airport and FAA officials at the airport on […]

As Hurricane Irma raged up the west coast of Florida, images of the storm were pouring from news sites and it’s inevitable that aircraft and airports will have suffered from the onslaught. For instance, there was a report Sunday that the roof was torn off the fire station at Naples Airport.There will be coverage of […]

The Air Force is proposing cutting costs on the future Air Force One aircraft by eliminating what has, until now, been considered an essential security measure. According to Defense One, Air Force brass are reportedly considering scrapping the converted Boeing 747-8i’s air-to-air refueling capability, saying the latest jumbo jets have all the range needed to […]

In a world stitched together by instant communication, it’s easy to forget that Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even web mail haven’t existed forever. None of them existed 25 years ago when Hurricane Andrew tore into the southern tip of Florida, instantly educating the populace on how bad a bad hurricane could be. Except it wasn’t […]

The Morane Saulnier Type L was an early wing-warping parasol design used in World War I both as a fighter and a trainer. At AirVenture in 2017, Daher—builder of the TBM—showed off a unique reproduction of the Type L. AVweb shot this video tour of the airplane. view on YouTube