Recent Updates

Nobody was seriously hurt when a Delta MD-88 ran off a runway at New York’s La Guardia Airport, in March 2015, but the NTSB said this week the crew made some mistakes in dealing with the situation. The flight crew’s decision to land on the snow-covered runway was “not inappropriate,” the safety board said, and […]

Pilots are not allowed to fly commercially in the U.S. if they have insulin-dependent diabetes, but a recent 18-month study of insulin-dependent commercial pilots flying in the United Kingdom found that no incidents were reported of pilot incapacitation due to blood sugar that was too high or too low. The study, conducted by the U.K. […]

The engine that came apart at altitude on a Southwest B737 last month lost one of its fan blades during the flight, the NTSB reported in an investigative update on Monday. The jet was en route from New Orleans to Orlando, Florida, when the incident occurred, and the crew diverted to Pensacola. They landed safely […]

Blue Origin, the aerospace company founded by tech billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced Monday a new family of heavy boosters capable of putting manned and heavy cargo payloads into earth orbit and beyond. Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said there will be both two- and three-stage versions of the booster and that one version will be capable of […]

Investigators looking for the final resting place of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 have spent more than $150 million using the latest sensing and navigation technology without result and now they’re hoping to try a high-tech version of a message in a bottle. Australian scientists have built six replicas of the flaperon from the Boeing 777 […]

Try this thought experiment: Before USAir 1549 splashed down in the Hudson, if you put 10 airline crews in a simulator and ran the same scenario, how many would achieve results identical to the real event? Hold that thought for a moment, I’ll get back to it. Of course, you can’t unknow the details of […]

Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo, VSS Unity, flew a first trial Thursday as the company continues to develop the newest version of its space-tourism vehicle. Virgin Galactic called the test, which lasted 3 hours and 43 minutes, a “captive carry” trial, during which the WhiteKnightTwo aircraft carried the space vehicle throughout the flight to monitor performance. […]

Drones hovering over fires have often been the bane of firefighters, but now special versions of the unmanned aircraft are going to be put to work on emergency response teams. The New York City Fire Department is training some of its crews to deploy bright red drones to view fires using video and infrared cameras,according […]

AVweb‘s search of news in aviation found announcements from Able Flight, Partners in Aviation, L-3 Aviation Products and Yingling Aviation.Able Flight and Lockheed Martin announced a scholarship to aid wounded warriors of the United States armed services. The Lockheed Martin Fighting Spirit Scholarship provides sports and physical activity programs for wounded veterans.Partners in Aviation, recently […]

From the unintended consequences file comes this: The Third Class medical exemption rips away the last vestiges of logic—if there ever was any—for retaining the weight limit for light sport aircraft. If you can fly a 6000-pound airplane without a medical, why are you limited to 1320 pounds under essentially the same conditions?The whole thing […]