Business Aviation Posts

I apologize if what I’m about to say causes anyone to cough up their lunch, but I’m going to completely agree with something that former FAA Administrator and now current Aerospace Industries CEO Marion Blakey said a few months ago. Yes,…

If you’ve been a regular Jetwhine reader, you know we seldom cover breaking news.Today is an exception for a number of reasons.Just a few minutes after Cessna’s vice president of marketing Tom Aniello briefed his sales force with the j…

By Scott Spangler – scott@jetwhine.comLearning that Green Flight International had made its first jet flight powered by bio fuel in October 2007 shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. After all, turbines were all the rage when I was g…

We’ve all been following a truly interesting flying story the past few days here at Jetwhine, simply because a 6,500 NM flight in a Cessna 400 – most of it out over the open waters of the Pacific – is hardly routine. Ferry pilot Ga…

We’ve all been talking about the looming pilot shortage – as well as a shortage of aviation mechanics. Some airlines have already begun feeling the pinch as the requirements for future cockpit members have begun to plummet in a simple su…

For those readers who may not follow everything aviation all the time, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was taken to task a few months ago for suppressing huge amounts of safety data related to the aviation industry.The info…

Another editor for a world-famous aviation magazine told me not long ago that he actually read my Jetwhine piece about the classic airline menus from a few decades back. Actually I think they harkened back to another lifetime in this industry.Besid…

To most people, the word deal implies something too good to miss … think, “Let’s Make a Deal,” or “No Big Deal.”But in aviation, and air traffic control specifically, a deal is an ugly gremlin of a phrase that im…

Knowing when to call for help is a critical element in learning to fly, in fact, it’s pretty darned important for survival in life as well. In an emergency, most people often don’t have the mental and sometimes the physical skills to se…

A Piper Navajo Chieftain crashed just after takeoff Saturday into the icy waters off Kodiak Island Airport about 250 miles southwest of Anchorage. Initial reports indicate the left nose baggage door on the aircraft opened up right after liftoff. Six…

You have to love the fact that the GOP supports business, even if it is mostly the Fortune 100s. The Minneapolis Star Tribune today reported that the Grand Old Party announced Northwest Airlines as their choice to be the official airline for this s…

While Kate Hanni’s name may not ring a bell in everyone’s head immediately, it certainly should for anyone who flies aboard a commercial airliner this holiday travel season … or any other time of the year actually. Hanni was recen…

Now that Senator Dick Durbin (D)IL has demanded action from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General we can only hope acting FAA administrator Bobby Sturgell is listening.The problem at hand is not really a tough one and is s…

It’s been quite a busy few weeks for the webmaster at the Cessna Skycatcher blog since the Textron subsidiary announced its plan to assemble the C-162 in China. The blog has been the landing site for a number of heated comments poking hard at …

The Christmas season may be a bit barren this year for the people who work for United Airlines. Not of course the management folks. Somehow their piece of the pie never seems to come out damaged when things are tight. I was thinking more of the ra…

Just when I thought I’d never again need to worry about remembering more model numbers Cessna tonight announced not only that it was the successful bidder in the Columbia bankruptcy case, but that it would rename those two new airplanes the Ce…

NASA’s administrator Michael Griffin said he made a mistake the other day and for many people that was enough. People do make mistakes and he said he was sorry.Griffin was answering demands from the public and the press about his agency’…

I have to admit I never gave this a thought before I read the story in the Times Online.Singapore Airlines, the first carrier to operate the Airbus A380, seems to have gone to great lengths to be sure that no one on board the massive aircraft is u…

I wonder how surprised the people at Bombardier actually were this weekend that SAS decided to permanently ground its fleet of 27 Q400 turboprops after a third landing gear accident in a month. The decision was announced Sunday as confidence in the …

The only thing I find surprising about the revelation that NASA has been sitting on a mountain of aviation safety data is that anyone is even remotely surprised about the way that agency operates.OK, maybe the fact that NASA sat on the data –…

John Carr’s blog – the Main Bang – posted an interesting piece the other day. He looked at pay scales for entry level controllers and found they will actually be paid less than janitors in Santa Clara County.But people still seem …

I’ve been really touched by how many regular readers noticed that Jetwhine just turned one.A year ago I had dinner with a buddy in Wichita who seriously questioned why I was trying to blend a little new media talk with the rest of the aviatio…

I heard an interesting interview on NPR last week with Richard Hurd from Cornell University. He said the use of labor strikes across the U.S. has declined by 90 percent since the 1970s.When Hurd began to focus on the Reagan Era, I expected to hear …

If I had to list things I would never have expected to see on Google Earth – the snappy video mapping software service run by the online giant – a flight simulator would probably be pretty high on the list.As you’ll read about at …