The White House nominated Erroll G. Southers as the next TSA administrator and assistant Homeland Security secretary. This selection had been widely anticipated for weeks, but the White House was waiting until Congress returned from its late-summer break to make the announcement. Senior lawmakers have apparently been briefed and have given their approval. Southers is assistant chief of the Los Angeles World Airports Police Department’s Office of Homeland Security and Intelligence.
Frasca International received FAA Level 7 qualification on its AS350 B2 helicopter flight training device (FTD) installed at FlightSafety International’s helicopter learning center in Tucson, Ariz. Frasca also is designing and building a Sikorsky S-76C++ helicopter simulator training device for Era Training Center in Lake Charles, La. That device, the third ordered by Era, will be Level 6 qualified. Era also uses Frasca trainers for the EC135 helicopter.
On Sept. 18, the FAA granted TSO authorization for Aspen Avionics’ EFD500 MFD, its EFD1000 MFD and the EWR50 Evolution Weather Receiver. With certification and production authority in hand, Aspen immediately began shipping the products to its dealers.
Cutter Aviation has expanded its on-demand charter operations to the Dallas/Fort Worth market through its new base at Collin County Regional Airport in McKinney, Texas. The company offers on-demand charter on a Hawker Beechcraft 400XP from the McKinney location. Cutter also offers charter from locations in Phoenix and Albuquerque.
As you wrote in your July Viewpoint (“A Matter of Perception,” page 9), public perception of business jets may be different from the reality, and that is especially so in Europe where we see a lot of aircraft whose owners hide under exotic registrations or companies.
Concerns over climate change add justification for a modernized U.S. air traffic control system, Time magazine reports, according to the Aerospace Industries Association. Under threat of a carbon tax, and for fuel savings, the aviation industry wants to fly the most economical routes possible, but the current airway and airport approach systems force inefficient routing. If the NextGen system is rolled out by 2018 as planned, airlines will use about one billion gallons less fuel, the FAA estimates.
Brian Delauter, named in September as the TSA’s permanent general manager for general aviation, said his top-three priorities are to improve communications with stakeholders, come to a resolution on the Large Aircraft Security Proposal and to remove waiver requirements for international arrivals. Strengthening outreach, communication and stakeholder involvement with the general aviation community are also among Delauter”s goals to improve relations with the GA community, said TSA spokesman Jon Allen.
A turbine-powered DC-3 had just undergone major maintenance on its propellers, night was falling and the pilots were in a hurry to get home. So, rather than conduct a maintenance test flight to a nearby airport, they decided the flight from Boise, Idaho, to their home base in Missoula, Mont., would serve the same purpose. They did an engine run-up and everything looked good, and minutes later they were winging their way home.
The FAA’s inconsistent interpretation of FARs between the agency’s Regional Offices, Aircraft Certification Offices (ACOs) and Flight Standards District Offices (FSDOs) has caused aviation businesses to suffer high, unnecessary costs, delays and obstacles, says a National Air Transportation Association member survey released Oct. 2. NATA intends to share the survey data with the GAO to support a review of the issues.
Sentient Jet, the Weymouth, Mass.-based private membership and charter provider, has opened new corporate offices in New York City. Sentient’s operations and command center will remain in Weymouth. The Weymouth and New York City offices will be supported by Sentient’s network of regional bases in Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Pittsburgh and Providence, along with three in California (San Francisco, Los Angeles and Orange County). Sentient said the addition comes as its membership and charter programs continue to grow.
Forty-four percent of available fractional business jet fleet shares remained unsold at the beginning of September. Excluding card programs, the 66-percent level of purchased shares is significantly lower compared to 71 percent a year ago and to the historical average of 73 percent, according to a UBS Business Jet Report issued in September. New share sales, including renewals, are off 50 percent from the recent peak in 2007, it said.
CRS Jet Spares, Fort Lauderdale, Fla., welcomes Stephanie Wilson to its team in the role of marketing coordinator. Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Fla., announced that Dr. Frank Ayers has been selected as executive vice president for its Prescott, Ariz., campus replacing Dan Carrell, who is retiring after 23 years in campus leadership at Embry-Riddle Prescott.
On a cold, rainy IMC night in November 1993, a 13-year-old Bell 206L was en route from the rural coastal community of Ellsworth, Maine, with a 70-year-old burn victim, two medical specialists and a pilot aboard. The helicopter ran out of fuel and crashed into Casco Bay, a few miles from Portland General Hospital, its destination. The pilot survived, but the three others aboard died. Search efforts located two of the passengers four days later in the submerged, inverted helicopter.
Senior FAA officials emphatically say they are committed to take account of the recent RTCA report on ATC modernization efforts and will use its findings to reshape NextGen priorities and make better use of existing technologies. The findings of an RTCA industry/government task force give the FAA “an excellent head start on the acceleration” of the modernization program, said FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt at the annual Air Traffic Control Association conference.
A move by China to loosen airspace restrictions on business jets could help fuel a demand recovery in that market, a Wall Street analyst says. Morgan Stanley’s Heidi Wood says the government’s decision last month to reduce the requirement to file civil flight plans to hours — instead of days or weeks — could be the spark that finally opens China’s lucrative but long-elusive bizjet market. The change was “made so quietly its true consequences have yet to be realized,” she wrote in a research note issued Oct.
After a Maryland State Police medevac helicopter crashed while on approach to Andrews Air Force Base in November 2008 killing four people (only the patient survived), Tom Judge, CEO of LifeFlight of Maine was asked to participate in a state panel to review and make recommendations regarding the emergency medical protocols for the use of medevac transport of trauma patients from the scene of an incident. “That was a brave thing for Maryland to do,” he says. “They took a lot of heat and this was no whitewash. They took a good hard look at the industry.”
EADS and Eurocopter have signed a cooperation agreement with the sovereign wealth fund SAMRUK-KAZYNA to create a public-private joint venture in Kazakhstan to develop helicopter services. The project includes both European and Kazakh partners. The signing took place during the recent official visit of French President Nicolas Sarkozy to Kazakhstan. The joint venture will transfer skills to local partners to develop an indigenous helicopter service industry in Kazakhstan.
By definition, low-level wind shear is a localized meteorological event occurring below 2,000 feet of altitude when an aircraft encounters rapidly changing wind speed or direction over a particular distance or time. When the encounter occurs at very low altitude — say, at takeoff or landing — there’s a very real possibility of the pilot losing control.
The FAA’s Customer Service Initiative is dead. Long live the Consistency and Standardization Initiative. FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt announced a new focus on improving the agency’s response to public safety complaints and internal whistle-blowers, as well as remedying its notoriously inconsistent interpretation of agency regulations and policies. The FAA’s new Consistency and Standardization Initiative (CSI) began life as the Customer Service Initiative in 2004.
Project Phoenix has delivered its first Phoenix CRJ to a Macau-based businessman. The delivery took place on Aug. 24 at the Flying Colours Corp. completion facility in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
ICAO members have reached agreement on environmental targets for the global aviation sector, although it is setting higher fuel efficiency standards than industry was proposing. After a high-level meeting in Montreal that ended Oct. 9, ICAO released a declaration of environmental goals for aviation, including a 2-percent annual improvement in fuel efficiency through 2020. This target is higher than the 1.5 percent proposed by the International Air Transport Association and other aviation industry groups.
