Safety, Ops & Regulation

COVID-19-related travel restrictions between European countries, including Germany and the UK, are tightening up, as the novel coronavirus spread accelerates in the region and threatens a fragile recovery in air travel demand.

Apollo Air Service has begun operating charter helicopter flights from England’s Cambridge City Airport, in a partnership both operator and airfield see as important for growth.

Now that the country’s Ministry of Economic Development and Supervisory Committee have issued final approval, Piaggio Aerospace and Banca Ifis have signed a contract for financing on contracts and factoring operations for €30 million euros ($357 million).

FAA receives more than 100 reports of drone sightings by pilots, citizens and police each month—it lists more than 400 in its latest report, for the April-June period.

More than 100 abandoned aircraft, ranging from McDonnell Douglas DC-8s to general aviation types, are to be auctioned off by Kenya’s airport operator.

The FAA says it will continue the work of a soon-to-end pilot effort with local and state governments and industry to introduce drones more regularly into the airspace system.

Planned flight trials at FAA-designated UAS test sites in New York and Virginia will evaluate remote-identification technologies to track drones from the ground in increasingly complex traffic environments.

NTSB attributes freighter crash to “the inappropriate response by the first officer as the pilot flying to an inadvertent activation of the go-around mode."

Congress passed the PRIA following airline accidents in which the NTSB found error by pilots with a history of poor performance.

Members of the NTSB’s Operational and Human Factors investigation team spent hundreds of hours looking into the backgrounds of the accident pilots.

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Business & Commercial Aviation News from September 1970

Bell Textron’s Bell 505 helicopter received airworthiness certification from the Tanzania Civil Aviation Authority. It is the sixth country in Africa

A group of 62 environmental organizations wants the FAA to abandon plans to establish takeoff and landing noise standards for civil supersonic aircraft.

Bombardier is changing its Safety Stand Down 2020 into a virtual event because of health and safety concerns in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Safety margins on wintry runways remain thin, and every landing needs the flight crew’s utmost attention and error-free performance.

Contaminated runways are “normal daily life” at Norwegian airports.

The new NOTAM reporting format for field conditions integrates well with the Runway Condition Assessment Matrix.

Scandinavia and Canada have led the way in researching better methods for quantifying anticipated runway braking action.

Israeli company Percepto says its Sparrow small unmanned aircraft system for industrial applications now features an integral parachute that meets FAA requirements.

When COVID-19 cases began to appear in some number in Wuhan, China, in January, Icelandic health officials moved quickly and decisively, focusing on

Daher has selected Elliott Aviation in Moline, Illinois, to install Garmin’s emergency autoland system on TBM 940 turboprops delivered in the U.S. in 2019 and the first half of 2020.

COVID-19 has slowed the FAA’s 17-year march toward airspace modernization.

The FAA will essentially have a new system for managing high-altitude air traffic once upgrades to the current En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system are completed in 2025, the Transportation Department inspector general reports.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a shift in the public’s perception of business jets away from a luxury product and to a safe and efficient alternative to commercial airlines, according to Asian charter operator Sino Jet.