Recent Updates

The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), the EU equivalent of the US FAA, published today long-awaited rules broadening the permitted use of single-engine turbine (SET) aircraft in commercial operations. Previously, commercial operators, both charter and cargo, were not permitted to operate any single-engine aircraft at night or in instrument meteorological conditions. Today’s rule lifts those […]

Senior executives from commercial-service airports large and small pleaded with the House Subcommittee on Aviation to increases the maximum authorized Passenger Facility Charge (PFC) in hearings Wednesday. “The PFC program allows the collection of fees up to $4.50 for every enplaned passenger,” says Sean Donohue, CEO of Dallas/Ft. Worth International. This maximum charge hasn’t been […]

Australia’s biggest airshow, the Australian International Airshow and Aerospace & Defence Exposition, runs all this week at Avalon Airport, with about 350 civil and military aircraft on display and nearly 700 exhibitors. The event operates as a trade show Tuesday through Thursday and opens to the public Friday through Sunday, with a range of airshow […]

It’s getting so a poor blogger can’t catch a breath around here. No sooner do I write about NASA considering sending the first Orion mission around the moon than along comes Elon Musk to say, never mind, we’re going next year. While fellow billionaire Richard Branson struggles to shoot a few tourists on a crummy […]

The pilot of a drone that hit a building, then fell into a crowd watching a parade and hit a 25-year-old woman, knocking her unconscious, has been sentenced to 30 days in jail by a Seattle municipal court. Paul Skinner, 38, of Washington, who owns an aerial photography company, was convicted of reckless endangerment, which […]

SpaceX will send two people on a trip around the Moon next year in a Falcon Heavy rocket, the company announced on Monday. The two private citizens, whose names have not yet been released, have already paid “a significant deposit,” SpaceX said. “Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying […]

The FAA is shooting itself in the foot with its inflexible attitude on medical disqualifications according to veteran instructor and aviation industry leader John King. King, who owns King Schools with his wife Martha, told AVweb in apodcast interviewthat he’ll be appealing the loss of his medical to an NTSB administrative law judge at a […]

AOPA has suggested a way to ease the impact of President Donald Trump’s frequent visits to his Palm Beach resort. AOPA President Mark Baker has written Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly asking that “security screening capabilities and gateway operations” be established at Palm Beach County Park/Lantana Airport to allow relatively normal GA operations […]

A couple of hunters from a small northern Canada village are being called the “luckiest two guys in the Arctic” after an RCAF patrol aircraft happened on them purely by accident and flew them to safety after a tricky landing on sea ice. Eugene Gibbons and Tyler Amarualik, of Hall Beach, a hamlet of 750 […]

Here’s an aerospace story that hasn’t generated much notice. The Trump White House is apparently pushing NASA to consider making the first flight of the new Orion manned space system a circumlunar flight, rather than an unmanned test mission. That has a nice, if somewhat melancholy, resonance to it. Fifty years after the fact, we […]