Karen Walker is Air Transport World Editor-in-Chief and Aviation Week Network Group Air Transport Editor-in-Chief. She joined ATW in 2011 and oversees the editorial content and direction of ATW, Routes and Aviation Week Group air transport content.
Karen serves on the board of directors of the International Aviation Club of Washington and was the IAC’s President in 2017-2018.
Karen has been writing about the aerospace and air transport industries for more than 35 years and is a recognized authority and commenter on the airline industry. She is a regular speaker and moderator at aviation events worldwide and a commentator on radio and TV news programs. In 2019, she was a judge and a presenter for IATA’s inaugural diversity awards.
Based in Washington D.C., she gained her degree in journalism in the U.K. and is a multiple winner of the Royal Aeronautical Society’s aerospace journalism awards.
She is the recipient of the Aerospace Media Awards 2021 Aerospace Writer of the Year.
With depressing repeatability, the latest terrorist bomb plot – thankfully foiled by intelligence agents – was again focused on bringing down a commercial airliner. According to the US Central Intelligence Agency, al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) was planning to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb device that was similar in concept to that worn in his underwear by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in the attempted attack on Christmas Day 2009. But the AQAP device used a new design that would have made it very difficult to detect by magnetometer.
Modifications to repair wing rib cracks on in-service Airbus A380s will begin in the first quarter of 2013 and the composite material at the root of the problem will no longer be used on new-production aircraft delivered from 2014.
