Word: faa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Thanks to last year's disarmament agreements with the former Soviet Union, 30 B-52 bombers are among the weapons that will be destroyed at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. The demolition provides the FAA with a chance to learn how to design passenger airliners that are more resistant to terrorist explosives. "The B-52s are a real windfall," says Lyle Malotky, the FAA's scientific adviser for aviation security. "When we laid out this program two years ago, we didn't expect to have such resources...
...FAA contends that safety was never compromised. But the episode raises serious questions about the agency's lack of a backup system, as well as its overwhelming reliance on AT&T, which handles more than 90% of the FAA's communications traffic. The outage is expected to revive an FAA plan to spend as much as $1 billion on a more reliable, high-tech phone system. The project had been vetoed by the General Services Administration as too costly...
Prompting the action was a mid-March accident in Florida that killed a family of four when their Malibu fell apart during a rainstorm. The FAA has not determined the cause of the accident and is still investigating the six similar mishaps, but says it has found evidence of "gross" excess strain on the wings of the aircraft that crashed. The manufacturer attributes the accidents to "pilot error and pilot inexperience" in adverse weather at speeds greater than the planes were designed to handle...
...Diego airline pilot launched the legal challenge to the FAA rule, citing Fourth Amendment prohibitions of unreasonable searches. San Francisco's Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the FAA, and the high court leaves that decision intact -- ending the case, but not the controversy. "There's not really a serious drug problem in the federal work force," says a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Government Employees, which has filed several anti-drug-test lawsuits. "We think the government could be better spending the $79 million that it's got committed to drug testing this year...
Production of MD-80 jetliners has returned to profitability after serious problems, and the company's newest hope, the 325-passenger wide-bodied MD-11 jetliner, is going through beat-the-clock flight testing to get FAA certification in October. Even so, first deliveries to airline customers will be later than originally promised, and revving up construction lines will require an investment of $2 billion this year. McDonnell maintained that his action was necessary to get the company ready for tougher days ahead, saying, "We cannot guarantee jobs where they do not exist...