News

A new museum will open its doors early next year at Clow International Airport (1C5) in Bolingbrook, Ill. Dubbed The Illinois Aviation Museum, the facility is being created by volunteers and a lot of community support, including the donation of a 6,000-square-foot hangar and $158,000 for interior remodeling, said Kent Demuth, the museum’s executive director. […]

Meanwhile, another very light jet hopeful, Safire Aircraft, saw most of its office equipment and shop tool inventory auctioned off late last month. The sale was forced by the owner of Safire’s former headquarters in Opa Locka, Fla., in an effort to recover some $60,000 in unpaid rent. It was reported that Safire’s CEO, Camilo […]

Eclipse Aviation has formed a strategic relationship with United Airlines to provide training. The idea is to provide “a level of professional training normally available only to airline pilots,” according to Eclipse CEO Vern Raburn. Originally, Eclipse had intended to develop its own training program, but concluded that United could “translate airline style training into […]

The Pennsylvania legislature has passed the Flying While Impaired Bill, which makes flying while drunk a misdemeanor, punishable by a $5,000 fine and possibly some jail time. The bill, which awaits Gov. Edward Rendell’s signature, was in response to the arrest of John V. Salamone last January after he took a four-hour joy ride while […]

A quick reminder: The 101st anniversary celebration of powered flight is set for Dec. 17 at the Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kitty Hawk, N.C.

The FAA has certified the Garmin G1000 in Mooney’s Ovation and Bravo aircraft. An STC was awarded to Garmin in November. Mooney has incorporated the approval into its Type Certificate. Meanwhile, Mooney continues growing, opening a sales office in Wichita, which new CEO Gretchen Jahn calls the “center of the universe” for aviation.

Pork is great in barbecue, but generally undesirable in Congressional budgets. Fortunately for NASA’s scramjet project, members of Congress from Tennessee, where the X-43A scramjet testbed was built, have thrown some pork into the hypersonic research recipe: $25 million worth. NASA had intended to scrap its hypersonic research after the second X-43A test, conducted in […]

Should Flight Service Stations and Air Traffic Control towers be open to pilots? Yes, say FAA officials. But it took some doing to get that admission, as doors slammed shut after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Under the current Code Yellow threat alert, FSS are still open for walk-in briefings — unless there is a […]

Compliance with at least four important FAA mandates falls due during the first four months of 2005. One of them is particularly important to pilots flying over water or wilderness. After Jan. 1, all airplanes on long over-water flights or flying over designated – mostly wilderness – land areas will have to be equipped with […]