Recent Updates

New reports claim that conversations captured by the Lion Air Flight 610 cockpit voice recorder (CVR) confirm that the pilots were unable to diagnose the control issues encountered in the minutes before the accident that claimed the lives of all 189 people onboard on Oct. 29, 2018. Although a complete transcript of the CVR recording […]

Image: Embraer Embraer has announced that CEO Paulo Cesar de Souza e Silva will be stepping down on April 22, 2019, at the end of his current two-year elected term. The announcement comes after one of Silva’s primary initiatives—a partnership with Boeing that will see Boeing take over 80 percent of the Brazilian company’s passenger […]

It was a very good afternoon in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. OK, the weather was well and truly lousy, and no one was flying. But a lot of pilots had somehow decided that it was the kind of afternoon where the right thing to do was sit in the ratty recliners, drink […]

The grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft has produced one of the most bizarre situations in the history of aviation. And what’s driving it, partly, is that modern airliners aren’t just airplanes, but veritable flying rivers spewing gigabytes of data on everything from cabin temperature to engine vibration, all of it recorded and quite a […]

Last month, the Aircraft Electronics Association reported a 17.6% bump in overall avionics sales. And while a good portion of that gain was attributed to a generally stronger new-airplane market, the bulk was pegged on the looming deadline for ADS-B Out equipage. That sounds plausible enough, but we decided to see what’s really happening down […]

Image: Delta Former Delta Air Lines executive Steve Dickson has been nominated by President Trump to become the next FAA Administrator. Recently retired as senior VP of flight operations at Delta, Dickson will, if approved by the Senate, take over an agency whose aircraft-certification procedures are under tremendous scrutiny after the second fatal crash of […]

Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has asked the DOT’s Inspector General to audit the FAA’s approval of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. This closely follows a detailed investigative piece by the Seattle Times revealing mischaracterizations of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), preliminarily thought to be a component of the two fatal crashes of […]

Time waits for no one and, certainly, no machine. But even with that in mind, light-aircraft aficionados might be surprised to know that a few popular aircraft designs are having significant anniversaries at Oshkosh this year. Baby Ace, 90 years. The high-wing homebuilt was first offered as a plans-built design in 1929. Of course, nine […]

To be certified as a factory-built LSA, Texas Aircraft Manufacturing’s Colt is set to debut at Oshkosh this year featuring an aluminum airframe, chromoly steel-tube “safety cell” and a ballistic parachute. If you think it looks a lot like the INPAER Conquest 180, you’d be right; Caio Jordo, who led the Brazilian lightplane manufacturer, is […]

Some of the Air Force’s most expensive and strategically sensitive aircraft have been evacuated from Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, Nebraska, after it was flooded by the Missouri River over the weekend. At least nine aircraft were flown to other bases and crews were working around the clock to try to protect facilities that […]