UK students win Paris Airshow rocketry award
Members of the Ridgeway Rocket Club from Ridgeway School and Sixth Form College, were crowned International Rocketry Challenge Champions at the 2023 Paris Airshow. The three students won the prestigious rocketry award after completing an international fly-off against teams from the US, Japan, and France. It is the first time a UK team have won the International Rocketry Challenge since 2019. The stringent 2023 mission requirements to...
Women needed for glider pilot study
Leinster Gliding Centre in Co Kildare ROI is currently recruiting women candidates to take part in a study on the experience of participating in learning to fly gliders in a typical gliding club environment. The study is being run in partnership with the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Trinity College Dublin. The participants in the study will become members of the Leinster Gliding Centre for six months, with membership and the...
Oxford company secures funding for CO2-based jet fuel project
An Oxford University start-up company has teamed with United Airlines to make jet fuel from carbon dioxide. In 2020, Oxford scientists announced they had discovered the process for transforming carbon dioxide into hydrocarbons that could be used to power aircraft. The team set up OXCCU, which announced at the beginning of June that it had secured £18 million in funding from new investors including two global energy companies and...
Unruly passengers on the rise
The International Aviation Transport Association (IATA) reports the number of unruly passenger incidents increased in 2022. IATA calls for more states to take the necessary authority to prosecute passengers under Montreal Protocol 2014 (MP14), and for greater crew de-escalation training. Analysis illustrates that the number of unruly passenger events changed from one in every 835 flights in 2021, to one in 568 flights in 2022. The...
Industry calls on government to enact student funding protection
Industry associations are calling on government to enact financial protection measures to prevent students from losing their training investment in the event of a flying school folding. Following the recent demise of two large Approved Training Organisations (ATOs), Tayside Aviation and FTA-Global, the British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA), Bristol Groundschool, Wings Alliance and Seager Publishing have written a joint letter to...
To oversee or not to oversee?
Investigations by FTN have uncovered the possibility that the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) may be failing in a statutory duty to provide financial oversight of UK flying schools, potentially increasing the financial risk to students enrolling on flight training programmes. As has been recently reported in FTN, two major UK Approved Training Organisation (ATOs) have collapsed over the last couple of months and in both instances,...
