Blog Posts

People say pilots have no patience. That’s not really true. We just don’t have much … especially for people who seem to miss the obvious. On another forum yesterday, someone asked whether anyone knew of problems before their company flew a business …

The G1 news website in Brazil posted an interview with the air traffic controller who was on duty when the Embraer Legacy and the Gol Airline Boeing 737 collided in late September. While I will post more of this later, I think the controller’s final…

In the past few weeks, almost every aviation organization in the United States has asked the Brazilian government to let Joe LePore and Jan Paladino come home. The two U.S. pilots have been detained in Brazil for 64 days since the midair collision i…

As I look back at nearly two months of captivity for the two Excelaire Legacy pilots in Brazil, I’m beginning to feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland when she said, “Things just keep getting curiouser and curiouser.”  Certainly that Joe LePore and J…

Convincing the Fox Network News people to give me five minutes of air time this past Thanksgiving Day to talk about Jan and Joe was a good beginning. And for that, they have my thanks. While I do wish we’d focused a bit less on the accident and mor…

As Day 56 dawns, Joe LePore and Jan Paladino are spending Thanksgiving in Brazil. The two have been under virtual house arrest since the late September mid-air collision between their Embraer Legacy jet and a Gol Airlines Boeing 737. While fully ad…

This is the 52nd since the late September midair collision between a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 and an Embraer Legacy 600 in the skies over the Brazilian rain forest and quite honestly, I’m baffled. Like others, I’m obviously perplexed by how these two…

An FAA spokesman in Oklahoma City just confirmed an item that had been floating around the Eclipse Aviation Critic blog … the Eclipse fleet is grounded until further notice. The recent Albuquerque news story that reported dozens of white tail Eclips…

Those are the folks I used as an example of how the tides of an aviation business, especially a manufacturing one, can slide down the hill faster than you can say “Here’s your Type Certificate.” Airbus had seen the first order cancellations of its m…

If you’re new to this industry, you might not have a feel for just how quickly the pendulum of fortune in an aviation business can swing.  Look no further than Airbus for a glimpse of pandemonium.  For the past few months, the bad news seemed to ce…

The aviation industry has a history of some pretty repulsive communications efforts aimed at customers and employees, like charging an airline’s best clients the highest possible ticket prices when those customers needed them most … at the least min…

The aviation industry has a history of some pretty repulsive communications efforts aimed at customers and employees, like charging an airline’s best clients the highest possible ticket prices when those customers needed them most … at the least min…

If the key to writing about anything is to add to the body of knowledge in the world that attempts to persuade people to do or not do something, it would seem the critical element – other than laying down some insightful prose that is – would be to …

As the first president of the American Federation of Labor back in the late 1880’s, Sam Gompers understood not simply the need for labor groups to preserve a necessary cohesiveness for success, but he also clearly saw the line in the sand between go…

Speaking to the Women in Aviation conference on Tuesday, FAA Administrator Marion Blakey repeated her agency’s call for a solid funding mechanism that more closely ties aviation system revenues to the cost of delivering services, in this case air tr…