Free Republic

A new bill in the House of Representatives, the Aviation Innovation, Reform and Reauthorization (AIRR) Act, sponsored by Rep. Bill Shuster (R-Pennsylvania), seeks to “privatize” the air traffic control system, which would strip oversight away from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and create a new, private, non-profit corporation to oversee air traffic control (ATC) operations.On the surface, this bill might sound like a good idea. But the word “privatize” is a misnomer. Instead of fixing legitimate problems with the FAA, the AIRR Act would overhaul the entire ATC system and replace a bureaucracy that is currently accountable to Congress with...

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has mandated that the skies over the presidential nominating conventions will be a no-fly zone. The FAA has warned pilots to give the Republican National Convention in Cleveland and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia a 34.5-mile radius.

Drone journalism is coming to a newspaper and TV station near you within 60 days. New Federal Aviation Administration rules on the flying devices opens the door to newsrooms using drones to cover events, peer into buildings and capture images like never before, according to the founder of the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska. "In 60 days, drone journalism will be legally possible in any newsroom in the United States. That's not to say it will be easy, but it will be legally possible in ways that it has never been before," wrote Matt Waite.

Last December, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) rushed an arbitrary and ineffectual recreational drone-owners’ registry into effect, mere days before Christmas and just in time to criminalize the flying of toys by thousands of children and hobbyists. The agency has potentially roped those toys under its definition of “aircraft” for purposes of all aircraft regulation as well. Following this bureaucratic overreach, a hobby drone operator who happens to be a lawyer, John Taylor, filed suit in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, challenging the registry.

Starting today, and continuing for the next month, the FAA has warned airplane pilots that GPS signals on on the West Coast, and especially over California and Nevada, may be impacted. The reason why is not exactly clear, but as Gizmodo notes, the US military will be testing a device or devices that will potentially jam GPS signals for six hours each day. Officially the tests were announced by the FAA but are centered near the US Navy’s largest installation in the Mojave Desert, China Lake, located "just down the road" from Area 51. The Navy has kept silent about...

FAA Warns of GPS Outages This Month During Mysterious Tests on the West Coast http://gizmodo.com/faa-warns-of-gps-outages-this-month-during-mysterious-t-1780866590

Before the FAA changed the hiring protocol in 2014, the majority of new air traffic control hires had served as controllers in the military or graduated from an FAA-approved Collegiate Training Initiative program — resulting in associate’s or bachelor’s degrees — and were given preference in hiring because of that experience. ... Since 2014, any applicants with aviation degrees or military service are now on equal footing with people without any experience, because the first step to being hired means passing the questionnaire. In some cases, applicants with no experience are passing the questionnaire while those with academic training degrees...

<p>The Federal Aviation Administration is ordering fixes on General Electric engines used on some Boeing 787 Dreamliners after it found that an icing problem can cause the engines to shut down mid-flight.</p>

Colorado Springs, Colo.—The Federal Aviation Authority (sic) would like to develop an implementation plan "as soon as possible" to begin transitioning responsibility for collecting and disseminating safety-related space situational awareness data from the Air Force to the FAA, the associate administrator for commercial space transportation at the FAA said Wednesday. "We would want to accomplish that transition in a crawl, walk, run manner, so that all of the key stakeholders were comfortable with the approach that was being used, and with the resulting products and services," George Nield said at the 32nd Space Symposium, adding that the transition could be...

In this election cycle, we hear a lot about the “establishment.” Most people are not really sure who they are, but they are sure that they do not like them. The anger toward the establishment is not party specific and has propelled two unlikely candidates: Donald Trump on the Republican side and Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democrats. The faithful following these outsiders may be more about “the grassroots trying to teach the establishment a lesson,” as Gary Bauer posited last month, than about affection for either man. In an InfoWars video, reporter Richard Reeves, at the University of Texas...

The slide landed at Self’s front door. “Someone else had called 911 and said that they had seen an object falling from an airplane,” Self told KPHO. The Federal Aviation Administration confirmed to KPHO that an Atlas Air Boeing 767 was on final approach to Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix when the emergency escape slide deployed on the plane’s right wing. The plane was 2,800 feet up when the slide deployed and the crew – who were the only ones onboard – landed safely. “Did they hear something? Did the captain know something was going on?” Self wondered to KPHO....

Just east of the Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World, Florida, is a lake. In the middle of Bay Lake is an island that Disney won't let anyone set foot on. That's because Discovery Island is home to an abandoned park that they'd rather nobody saw. Just across the water is another deserted park, River Country. These images show nature reclaiming what Disney left behind. These are the only Disney parks to close permanently. Discovery Island was a nature reserve open between 1974 and 1999 and River Country, a water theme park, operated from 1976 to 2001.

A motion filed by the Federal Aviation Administration in Federal Court admits the agency is unable to recover missing and “corrupted” emails at the center of a cheating scandal exposed by FOX Business Network’s “Trouble in the Skies” last May. The FBN report led to the resignation of Joseph Teixeira, Vice President of the FAA’s Safety and Technical Training Air Traffic Organization. Several members of Congress, including the chairman of the aviation subcommittee Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ), demanded an investigation after rejected applicants who tried to become Air Traffic Control Specialists (ATCS) sued the FAA. They also filed a freedom...

Flight Student Facing Deportation Over Trump Post Russ Niles A commercial flight school student from Egypt is in jail in California after he posted what immigration officials perceive as a threat to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. It appears the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department is intent on deporting Emadeldin Elsayed for the Facebook post even though there was not enough evidence to charge him criminally. In the post, Elsayed said he would be willing to go to prison for life for killing Trump and the world would thank him for it. Elsayed and his lawyer Hani Bushra both have...

NEW YORK (AP) - U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer wants to require the Federal Aviation Administration to establish seat-size standards for commercial airlines, which he says now force passengers to sit on planes "like sardines." The New York Democrat told The Associated Press the airlines have been slowly cutting down legroom and seat width. "One of the most vexing things when you travel on an airplane is there's almost no legroom on your standard flight," Schumer said. "There's been constant shrinkage by the airlines." He said he will add an amendment to the FAA Reauthorization Bill that is pending before Congress...

The nation’s antiquated, balky, delay-prone air traffic control system could finally be a thing of the past, after a House committee approved a bill to transform the horribly mismanaged government-run Air Traffic Control system into a federally chartered non-profit corporation.

Donald Trump's private jet made an emergency landing in Nashville Wednesday afternoon after the pilot reported engine problems, officials said. The Boeing 757 landed in Nashville at 4:40 p.m., the Federal Aviation Administration said. Trump eventually made it to the event he was attending. It was unclear how he got there. The FAA is investigating the incident.

The Washington Post has an interesting interview this week with William Merideth, the Kentucky businessman who famously took a shotgun and introduced a terminal malfunction to a camera equipped drone hovering over his property last year. The case, while providing some amusement to the public initially, has raised vexing questions about property rights, privacy, and the limits of the government (under the auspices of the Federal Aviation Administration) to control the airspace over your property. It’s been mostly settled law for quite some time that property owners control the mineral rights and other resources under their land, but how much...

America's air traffic control towers suffer from a stunning lack of diversity--that's the official position of the Obama Administration's FAA, which quietly moved to abolish merit-based testing for air traffic controllers two years ago in an attempt to boost the number of women and minorities in the career field. Blacks and Hispanics apparently don't score as high on the Air Traffic Selection and Training (AT-SAT) exam, the test the FAA once used to judge an applicant's job knowledge. That's not really a shocker, considering the fact that blacks and Hispanics score lower on every standardized test known to man, including...

The FAA finally confirmed this afternoon that model aircraft registrants' names and home addresses will be public. In an email message, the FAA stated: "Until the drone registry system is modified, the FAA will not release names and address. When the drone registry system is modified to permit public searches of registration numbers, names and addresses will be revealed through those searches." I've been trying to get to the bottom of whether names and home addresses of model aircraft or hobby drone owners - including children as young as 13 - will be made available by the FAA to the...