The Air Current

“Unless [Boeing] is able to raise funds through a Rights Issue, I see an imminent investment downgrade with Chapter 11 looming on the horizon,” Emirates president Sir Tim Clark told The Air Current this weekend.

There’s been a lot of intense discussion this past week regarding eVTOLs vs. helicopters. Can’t we all just get along?! Coincidentally, that’s the underlying theme of my latest article for The Air Current, which explores whether there should be separate FAA advisory circulars for eVTOL vertiports and heliports. “Probably not” is the answer that a growing number of eVTOL and helicopter players seem to agree on.   The FAA will be discussing its updated vertiport engineering brief in a virtual industry day meeting on Monday, Sept. 30. Helicopter people should be paying close attention to this, too, because the implications for the helicopter industry are substantial. Link to sign up is here: https://lnkd.in/eFMRhkYG

From Jon Ostrower, a deep dive on Boeing's status as the machinists' strike continues into its second week. "What a moment,” said a senior Boeing executive. “On the bright side, I hope this is the start of a transformation. Otherwise, it’s all over.” #staycurrent

"Interviews with company and supplier leaders, managers, engineers and machinists paint a picture of growing strategic uncertainty and diminishing stability at a time when the opposite is required from the U.S. aerospace institution." The latest from The Air Current is a reflection at the conclusion of the first week of the strike by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers at Boeing. #staycurrent

The latest from The Air Current is the cleared final hurdle for Alaska Airlines and Hawaiian Airlines to merge into a single business. After the successfully fighting American's Northeast Alliance with JetBlue and JetBlue's own merger with Spirit, the upcoming transaction is being used to advance broader Biden Administration policy goals around consumer protections, weeks before the U.S. presidential election. #staycurrent

I caught up with Robert Rose at Reliable Robotics Corporation to discuss the company's new TACFI award and recent participation in Agile Flag 24-3. As usual, it was a fascinating conversation. “We previously thought that what we were doing was we were selling autonomy to the U.S. government,” he told me. "What we realized during Agile Flag is that we’re actually selling small aircraft, and autonomy is kind of like a second-order problem.” Full story is now online at The Air Current.

SCOOP from Will Guisbond: The Federal Aviation Administration had prior knowledge of risks related to an equipment bandwidth issue that later caused at least three separate radar failures on Sept. 2 at the facility that controls the busy airspace around Newark Liberty International Airport.

A question I hear a lot is: How will all of these eVTOL air taxis fly into busy airports without disrupting commercial airline traffic? Well, NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Joby Aviation have been working on that. Their latest research demonstrates how relatively straightforward procedural changes can support a surprising number of eVTOL operations at Class B airports. For The Air Current, I dug into the details of how that would work.

About a month ago, Newark-area air traffic controllers at the New York TRACON reported to work not on Long Island, but in Philadelphia, as a part of a massive relocation effort by the Federal Aviation Administration aimed at solving serious staffing and delay problems in the area. My latest for The Air Current seeks to explore a single central question: could it actually work? Find out the answer here:

Ten previous in-flight failures were attributed to a material defect. Safety assessments showed that a catastrophic failure could be expected. Pilots were never told, the manufacturing problem was never solved — and all of this was left out of the official report. Read Elan Head's in-depth investigation: https://lnkd.in/e7b5HEcX