Free Republic

Two commercial aircraft were ordered to abort landings at Reagan National Airport on Thursday after a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter entered airspace near the runway while en route to the Pentagon. Delta Air Lines Flight 1671, arriving from Orlando, and Republic Airways Flight 5825, arriving from Boston, were both directed to perform go-arounds by air traffic control at approximately 2:30 p.m. local time. “A UH-60 Blackhawk was directed by Pentagon Air Traffic Control to conduct a ‘go-around,’ overflying the Pentagon helipad in accordance with approved flight procedures,” said US Army spokesperson Capt. Victoria Goldfedib in a statement. ”As a...

Family members of January's Potomac River plane and helicopter crash victims voiced frustrations after Thursday's Senate aviation subcommittee hearing. ... Family members of the victims of the January plane and helicopter crash at Reagan National Airport (DCA) voiced frustrations with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) after a preliminary report found that the airport had 1,500 near misses in the past three years. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)’s preliminary report was presented at Thursday’s Senate Subcommittee on Aviation, Space, and Innovation hearing. Victims’ families and their lawyers argued that the NTSB’s findings suggested the deadly crash was preventable. “I was...

An already hectic holiday travel day was made more chaotic with two separate plane collisions on the tarmac at Boston Logan International Airport just hours apart on Monday. In the first crash, an American Airlines jet that was taxiing to its gate clipped the wing of a parked Frontier Airlines plane, local ABC affiliate station WCVB reported. “That was terrible. It was very scary. All of a sudden, ‘thump.’ It sounded like something fell from below,” Evelyn Pipione, a Frontier passenger ... Video obtained by Storyful shows the battered wing of the smaller Frontier plane underneath the wing of the...

‘Ambitious’ Limited Access Channel Opens Less than a month after the Dali rammed a pillar of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge causing it to collapse, a portion of the federal channel has been opened to deep draft ships. The opening of the 35-foot-deep Limited Access Channel allowed the departure of some of the ships trapped in Baltimore Harbor. The first ship through was the general cargo ship Balsa 94, bound for Canada, followed by the cargo ship Saimaagracht and car carrier Carmen. More transits are expected. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the LAC is open to scheduled passages...

Some aviation experts argue the FAA’s focus on ‘diversity’ instead of ’merit' in hiring pilots and controllers is leading to serious safety concerns... As the U.S. Justice Department decides whether to pursue a criminal case against Boeing, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating dozens of airplane incidents since January, including one in which a Swiss Air jet almost collided with four other planes on the runway at JFK International Airport in New York City. The FAA has more than 100 aviation accidents and incidents since the beginning of 2024. These include airplane and helicopter crashes, equipment and mechanical malfunctions,...

There have been at least 19 separate instances in which airplanes nearly smashed into one another in the first 10 months of the year, according to a shocking report. The staggering number of near-misses between January and October marks a dramatic increase in narrowly averted airline crashes — the most since 2016, according to Federal Aviation Administration data viewed by the Wall Street Journal. The total number for the year is not yet known, but is expected to continue to climb.

Two asteroids swooping past Earth Wednesday may have caught the attention of the public, but events like these are not actually rare, NASA scientists say. "This is the first time we've seen [two] combined within a 24-hour period, but that's probably because we don't know everything that is out there," said Lindley Johnson, program executive of the Near-Earth Object program at NASA headquarters in Washington. Single asteroids have been known to make such close passes, but they usually slip by unnoticed, .. In fact, with a rough estimate of 50 million unknown asteroids, a 33-foot-wide (10-meter) near-Earth object could pass...

The late Bart Giamatti, far too briefly the commissioner of baseball, understood the essence of his sport better than most people. ``It breaks your heart,'' he wrote. ``It is meant to break your heart.'' ADVERTISEMENT There is evidence of that every day but it was never more convincing than 43 years ago Sunday when Harvey Haddix pitched the greatest game ever and wound up with nothing more to show for it than another loss. There have been 16 perfect games pitched in baseball history, each of them discussed in James Buckley Jr.'s new book, ``Perfect.'' The roster includes Hall of...