Scheduled nap times may help eliminate the problem of air-traffic controllers who fall asleep on the job. But even if such measures were in place, they would have done little to prevent the brief but worrisome aborted landing of a U.S. Air Force jet carrying First Lady Michelle Obama on April 18 after it got too close to a cargo plane ahead of it. The reason: the blips of the aircraft involved had momentarily vanished from radar. The ...

The 23-year-old son of a banker from Nigeria should have tripped every alarm in the global aviation-security system put in place after 9/11: He bought a $2,831 ticket for flights from Lagos to Amsterdam to Detroit and paid for it in cash. He left no contact information with the airline. He checked no bags. Seven months earlier, he had earned himself a spot on a security watch list in Britain after applying for a visa to attend ...

Federal aviation authorities are expected to suspend or revoke the licenses of the two Northwest Airline pilots involved in last week's overflight of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, a federal official said.

The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating how an international flight into Atlanta's major airport landed on a taxiway instead of a runway early Monday. FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said Delta Flight 60, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, was cleared to land about 6:05 a.m. Monday on Runway 27R but landed instead on Taxiway M, which runs parallel to the runway. The flight had 194 passengers and crew aboard, according to CNN affiliate WXIA. No other ...

The global aviation industry has agreed to cut its net carbon emissions to half 2005 levels by 2050 under a plan to be set out on Tuesday by British Airways chief, Willie Walsh. Mr Walsh, who will outline the initiative at Tuesday's United Nations forum on climate change in New York, said it was the "best option for the planet" and should be taken up at the December Copenhagen summit, where world leaders are due to come up with a ...

Three years ago many would have dismissed the notion that a significant supply of the world's automotive fuel could come from algae. But today the idea, while still an adventurous one, is getting much harder to ignore. Back then there were only a handful of companies seriously focused on producing algae fuel. Now there are well over 50, according to Samhitha Udupa, a research associate with Lux Research. The number should double within the next year or two, ...

Inside a freezer in a research laboratory at the University of Washington are blood and blood plasma samples from 92 people who suffer from mysterious illnesses, including tremors, memory loss and severe migraine headaches. They are mostly pilots and flight attendants who suspect they've been poisoned in their workplace -- on board the aircraft they fly. Clement Furlong, University of Washington professor of medicine and genome sciences, leads a team of scientists who have been collecting the samples for ...

Troubled British Airways plans to raise nearly a billion dollars of emergency cash funding as it tries to survive the current economic downturn, the airline said Friday. The news is an indication of bad times at BA, which is facing the threat of summer strikes by ground staff. Earlier this month, its pilots accepted a pay cut in exchange for the promise of shares to help the airline save money. The airline said it will try to raise £600 million ...

The last time Terry Williams can remember being headache-free was in December. A chronic migraine has plagued her ever since. So have balance and vision problems, a tremor in her left arm, a prickly sensation in her feet and a loss of childhood memories. The ailments, she says, began on April 11, 2007. Williams, then a 17-year flight attendant on American Airlines, noticed a "misty haze type of smoke" on flight No. 843 as it taxied toward a gate in ...

Cars have global position systems to pinpoint where drivers are when they get lost, so why can't GPS be used to locate the exact position of planes when the worst happens? It took search and rescue teams over 30 hours to locate the wreckage of the Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic on Monday, the onboard GPS system proving no aid to rescuers in the mission. Although details of flight AF447's fate remain uncertain, in some ...