Recent Updates

Boeing’s mighty B-52 has yet to exhaust its cat-like nine lives. This week, the U.S. Air Force’s 307th Bomb Wing in at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana was delivered a B-52H that had previously been mothballed at Davis-Monthan AFB. “Wise Guy,” parked in 2008, underwent a brief refurbishment of just over a month at […]

Although originally planned for 2028, NASA says it can accelerate the next Moon mission to 2024 and it wants more money to do it. NASA and the White House have requested a $1.6 billion budget amendment to fly the so-called Artemis mission four years sooner than planned. The project is named after the Greek goddess […]

SpaceX head Elon Musk tweeted out a photo of 60 Starlink satellites packed into the nose of a Falcon rocket. SpaceX is slated to launch the rocket Wednesday, but the photo previews Musk’s desire to provide internet access around the world where ground-based infrastructure is impossible to too expensive. The 60 Starlink satellites are the […]

In the “git ‘er done” spirit of the heartland, a South Dakota county has granted an aerial application company the right to land and take off on county roads to fertilize local fields. Brookings County has been drenched by storms in the critical first few weeks of the growing season and Isaac Wilde, of Wilde […]

A fuel truck driver at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport has been charged with dangerous driving after his truck ran into the front left side of an Air Canada Express Dash-8 Friday. The truck collapsed the fuselage below the captain’s seat on the regional airliner as it was taxiing to the gate about 1:30 a.m. The […]

India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) had some unusual crew resource management advice for Air India Express after a seasoned captain dumped a Boeing 737-800 in a drainage ditch at Cochin Airport in April of 2017 despite repeated warnings from his much younger female first officer. In its report, the DGCA tribunal said the […]

While Boeing engineers and the FAA put the finishing touches on the software makeover for the Boeing 737 MAX, a potentially more daunting task has been handed to the company’s marketing department as it restores confidence in the aircraft. Some online travel agents have added filters to their search engines to alert customers if they’re […]

Virgin Galactic took a big step away from its test program toward commercial development of space tourism with a move from the high California desert to a purpose-built passenger flight facility in New Mexico. CEO Richard Branson announced Friday that it will be moving a significant part of its operation to a taxpayer-funded spaceport in […]

Boeing 737 MAX That design is so utterly incompetent and the FAA allowing it is so utterly incompetent that it boggles the mind of this pilot flying for 35 years! Clearly the airline rule of requiring redundancy of any component with a greater than 1 in 10,000,000 chance of failure was ignored. Considering the MCAS […]

I was piloting N7304Y, a Miller Twin Comanche (a veritable “hot rod”) from San Antonio’s Stinson Airport to Houston Hobby Airport early in the morning. Houston Center passed me to Approach and then to the final controller for Hobby. Approach: “Say your indicated airspeed.” 04Y: “Indicating 140 knots on the dial.” Approach: “Maintain 140.” 04Y: […]