Recent Updates

NBAA and four businesses have petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals to review the FAA’s deal with the City of Santa Monica to shorten the airport’s runway. Under the deal, the runway would be cut immediately to 3,500 feet from almost 5,000, limiting its use and likely forcing some of the current tenants to immediately […]

ExpressJet Airlines led major U.S. carriers for 2016 in highest percentage of bags lost. According to Department of Transportation statistics, ExpressJet received reports of mishandled baggage from 0.43% of all passengers—91,383 bags—which was down from their 2015, also industry-leading, loss rate of 0.51% of passengers reporting bags mishandled. At the opposite end of the spectrum, […]

More than 90% percent of certification work on new aircraft and aircraft parts is outsourced by the FAA to the manufacturers themselves, according to a GAO report. Similar to the FAA delegation of airman certification authority to Designated Pilot Examiners, the FAA has been authorizing most certification work to be performed by employees of the […]

Military pilots aren’t flying often enough to be as proficient as they need to be, Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, the head of Marine Corps aviation, told reporters in Washington, D.C., recently. “We’re about three hours per pilot per month better than we were [in May 2015], but that’s not good enough,” Davis said, according to […]

The next Air Force One should be anything other than a Boeing 747; even Northrop Grumman’s next-generation stealth bomber would be a better choice, says a report by Wright Williams & Kelly (WWK). President Trump has tweeted that he finds the $3.2B projection for the Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization program to replace the Air Force’s Boeing […]

Lancair International announced last summer it would sell off its older designs and focus on its newer Evolution aircraft, and recently the company, now known as Evolution Aircraft Company, said it has found a buyer. Mark Huffstutler, founder of the aircraft modification firm Sierra Industries, based in Texas, and his son Conrad Huffstutler will assume […]

General aviation pilots have several auto-fume modes. One of them is ADS-B and anything to do with medicals is a good way to get people spun up. So is the argument that the administrator of the FAA should be a pilot. This is a perennial and it came up last week when President Donald Trump […]

Just over a year after EHang’s passenger-carrying autonomous drone was unveiled in Las Vegas, officials in Dubai said this week they plan to provide flights to the public in the aircraft by this summer. “The AAV [autonomous aerial vehicle] on display at the World Government Summit is not just a model but it has really […]

Sometimes it takes a village to fix an airplane and a remote Canadian town is sharing some of the credit for getting a Swiss International Airlines Boeing 777 back into revenue service. On Feb. 1 Swiss Flight LX 40 from Zurich to Los Angeles diverted to Iqaluit (formerly called Frobisher Bay), population 8,000, on Baffin […]

About 20 passengers aboard a United Airlines flight decided they really didn’t need to go to San Francisco after all on Saturday after their casually dressed captain delivered a bizarre rant over the PA system. The unidentified pilot boarded the aircraft in Austin wearing a ball cap and a t-shirt and opened by asking the […]