You got to hand it to the folks at Taiwan’s EVA Airlines; they’re taking the hypoxia threat seriously. Each of its pilot cadets learning to fly airliners at the University of North Dakota’s Mesa, Arizona flight training center will take a ride in a hypobaric chamber before leaving the USA to go back to Taipei and fly the airline’s big jets. Nearly a decade ago, air safety officials in Greece suggested that that all airline pilots undergo hypoxia training, following the loss of a Boeing 737 on a flight from Cyprus to Athens that killed 121 people on August 14, 2005. Neither the captain nor… Read More…

>N671US in Shannon days ago. Photo courtesy Kevin Corry This just in: The Delta Air Lines Boeing 747 N664US which was heavily damaged by hail on a flight to Seoul Korea last month will return to the United States late this week but it appears her flying days are over. This Queen of the Sky, I am told, is headed for Marana Aerospace Solutions, a enormous boneyard for retired airliners north of Tucson, Arizona. For more on this story, read on. This post has been updated with more information about the process of taking an airliner out of desert storage. First its Arizona retirement was… Read More…

Tyler addresses the executives Photo by IATA Writing from Miami – It seems strange to me that under the guidance of the soft spoken and urbane Tony Tyler, the airline industry should be experiencing its strongest growth and profitability but there you have it. Just four years after the former chief of the International Air Transport Association, Giovanni Bisignani nominated himself the best director general of the association ever in the pages of his book, Shaking the Skies, in waltzes his polar opposite and actually sees much of  Bisignani’s big wish list getting accomplished. Yes, it’s a happy group of global airline bosses here in Miami… Read More…

What forces of fate allow thousands of people to cross the same terrain without seeing the crashed airplane that John Weisheit discovered on May 20th? And what does his find tell us about the still-missing Boeing 777 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014?  Stay with me because I believe these two stories are related. River guide and Colorado River advocate John Weisheit was hiking in the Grand Canyon National Park with several others last week when the group came across the wreckage of a plane wedged between two boulders. The aircraft was “smashed, so compressed that it was really… Read More…

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo by Jay Davis The adage that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it, can be appropriately applied to the search for answers to the disappearance of Malaysia 370, now approaching its first anniversary.  Oh no, I’m not talking about the theories that the plane was flown to Diego Garcia. I’m talking about the breast-beating accompanying the reports that the deep sea search for the missing airplane may come to an end and with it dies all possibility of knowing what really happened and why. That’s not true. While having the airplane would be nice,… Read More…

Hawaiian Airlines at New York For every up there’s a down, and no industry knows that better than the airlines. No, I’m not talking about takeoffs and landings, but the good news/bad news of declining fuel prices. As an airline, Hawaiian may have spent an unduly long time on the ground. It formed in 1929 but when commercial aviation reached its mid-century heyday it was the Pan Ams and the Uniteds and not Hawaiian that was lifting travelers by the plane full.   “The pathway to where we were then and where we are today has been a torturous one,” Mark Dunkerley the airline’s CEO… Read More…

The Facebook page of Global Girl See previous post on this subject here. The owner of the flight school where popular online aviatrix Nadia Marcinko received her private and commercial pilots licenses says Marcinko also used the name Nada Marcinkova while attending the school in Palm Beach, Florida, linking the Gulfstream Girl / turned-Global Girl to the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal. Police in Palm Beach claim that the New York billionaire and convicted sex-offender identified Marcinkova as his friend to some of the teenagers he paid to have sex with him at his Palm Beach mansion in 2005 and 2006. After a long investigation, the police in Palm… Read More…

Bookending the aviation news for the year 2014 is the Dreamliner battery; the sizzling lithium ion-flavored power source that I suggested in January was already being reviewed by the eggheads and pocket protector-wearing engineers at Boeing. The end of the year arrives and the Japan Transport Safety Board is asking for the same thing.  I’m not bragging about being prescient here because any reasonable person can see that the risks outweigh the benefits of using this high-density battery chemistry. It’s the recipe used more than a decade ago for laptops and handheld devices that started to spontaneously combust prompting the world’s largest industrial recall.  In a report… Read More…

Now. While we are celebrating the Wright Brothers historic flight 111 years ago, let me tell you the story of two other brothers; pilots and tinkerers who, in their own small way are commemorating the achievement and contributing to the Wright Brothers legacy. Nick and Giles English are founders of the Bremont Watch Company, based in Henley-on-Thames in England, who struck a deal with the Wright Family Foundation to embed in a limited edition watch, a scrap of fabric from the wing of the original Wright Flier. Even while the popularity and necessity of conventional watches is on the wane there is a small and… Read More…

Firefighters at Logan Airport NTSB photo How many ways did the company producing the lithium ion batteries on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner fail to meet safe standards? I’m still wading through the 100 page report and the exhibits in the thick docket accompanying it, but so far, the list is lengthy. On Monday, the National Transportation Safety Board released the result of its near two year investigation into the battery fire event on a Japan Airlines 787 at Boston’s Logan Airport in January 2013. The NTSB follows by three months, a similarly exhaustive probe by the JTSB, its Japanese counterpart, into another Dreamliner battery problem… Read More…