Recent Updates

The House has passed a package of tax measures that would, among other things, revive bonus depreciation on capital investments, including aircraft. Bonus depreciation allows businesses to write off up to 50 percent of the value of equipment purchased in and put into service in 2014. There are also reports the plan is to make […]

Retail giant Amazon told the FAA this week that it would rather be testing its delivery drones in the U.S., but since the agency has stymied the company’s efforts, jobs and investment in the program are being exported to sites outside the country. “These non-U.S. facilities enable us to quickly build and modify our Prime […]

It’s not often that a passenger throws the chief flight attendant off a flight but that’s the scenario that led to a recent Korean Airlines flight leaving JFK late. Of course it wasn’t just any passenger. Cho Hyun-Ah (who goes by Heather Cho), the family-run airline’s executive vice president and daughter of CEO Cho Yang-Ho, […]

Letter of the Week:Third Class Medical Issues Regarding Woody Beck’s article on the decline of GA: He states the following,“Over the longer term, changes in the third class medical will have no significant impact because its cost is negligible, roughly the cost of 15 gallons of av fuel every two years for us older pilots.” […]

Researchers at Caltech and the University of Arizona are working on a system that may someday allow aircraft designers to drastically reduce the size of the vertical stabilizer. That, they say, will reduce weight and drag and save a lot of fuel. The researchers installed small jets along the rudder and blew streams of air […]

Competition between airlines is nothing new but Canada’s largest carriers seem to be in a pitched battle to prove which is the nicest. Last Christmas, WestJetthrew down the good cheer gauntlet by treating two loads of passengers to their Christmas wishes, which were delivered on the baggage carousel. The resulting video got nearly 37 million […]

Now that the airliner seat reclining issue seems to have subsided, a Dallas company has come up with another gadget designed to keep us from getting too close to our fellow passengers. The Soarigami is a plastic divider that clips on armrests to allow passengers on each side a segregated sliver of personal forearm space. […]

On December 5, 2014, NASA flew the new Orion deep space vehicle for the first time, launched by a Delta Heavy booster. In this NASA-provided footage, the first part of the mission is detailed. view on YouTube

NASA’s Orion unmanned spacecraft successfully launched, orbited the Earth and splashed downFriday morning on its first test flight, one day after the liftoff was scrubbed due to weather and mechanical problems.Orion, a prototype capsule for future manned space missions, made two laps around the Earth, rode its Delta IV rocket up to 3,600 miles, then […]

Watching the Orion launch on NASA’s splendid live feed on Friday, I was asking myself if it made me feel that old Apollo magic. The answer: it did. Even though the vehicle was unmanned, its ultimate purpose is to put the U.S. back into the manned spaceflight business. That’s on my short list of worthy […]