The Fees Don’t Stop Comin’

Unfortunately, city officials all over the country are being taught about landing fees, and it’s spreading at an alarming rate! Aero-News friends over at Stop ADS-B Abuse have long profiled these infernal systems, where ADS-B data can track aircraft activity for fully-automated billing at participating airports. Right now, Arizona’s Falcon Field (FFZ) is looking to impose some landing fees of their own, and locals are putting up a fight. The Phoenix area is plush with flight training, but it’s a delicate ecosystem.

G300 Kicks Off Test Campaign With a Successful 2 Hour 25 Minute Flight

Gulfstream’s newest addition to its next-gen lineup, the super-midsize G300, is officially airborne. The G300 was unveiled just two months ago in Savannah, instantly sliding in as Gulfstream’s fresh entry into the super-midsize market.

Peraton Contracted to Oversee Construction of the New System

The Trump administration has officially locked in its pick to spearhead the biggest upgrade to America’s air traffic control system in decades. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford announced on December 4 that Virginia-based national security company Peraton has been selected as the program’s Prime Integrator.

Also: Cosmonaut Kicked Out, Airbus Scales Back, AF Silver Star, Russian A-60 Clobbered

A Samaritan’s Purse humanitarian flight was hijacked on Tuesday, December 2, while attempting to supply a mobile medical unit in South Sudan. Authorities were able to meet the aircraft on the ground and take the suspect into custody without further incident. The aircraft involved was one of the organization’s Cessna Grand Caravans that operates solely within Africa. The FAA has taken an unusually cooperative step towards pilot mental health reform, reducing the stabilization wait time for approved antidepressant medications from 6 months to just 3. Though this is, in itself, a basic change, it reflects years of industry efforts. Under the revised policy, airmen and air traffic control specialists may now submit Special Issuance medical packages after maintaining a stable dose of an approved antidepressant for at least three continuous months. The maid

Lt. Col. Alexander Prevendar Assumes Leadership Role

The U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds Air Demonstration Squadron welcomed Lt. Col. Alexander Prevendar as their new commander for the upcoming 2026-2027 air show seasons. He succeeds outgoing commander Col. Nathan Malafa in a ceremony at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Also: Electra Goes Military, Miami Air Taxi, Hypersonics Lab, MagniX HeliStrom

Amazon’s Prime Air drones are back in the spotlight after one of its newest MK30 delivery drones struck an overhead internet cable in Waco, Texas. The incident serves as an unnerving replay of safety concerns that surfaced just two months ago involving back-to-back collisions with a crane in Arizona. The more recent event occurred on November 18. The drone, registered  N139PA, had just wrapped up a delivery when it “clipped a thin, overhead internet cable,” according to Amazon. The maiden flight of LandSpace’s ZhuQue-3 rocket on December 3 was one for the books… for both its successes and failures. The rocket reached orbit before the first stage booster recovery attempt resulted in an explosion near the edge of the landing pad. A soldier with no aviation experience was trained how to create flight plans and flew unmanned Black Hawk hel

Also: Trailblazing Aviator Betty Stewart, Wind Farm Scrutiny, Chatham Ban Overturned, Airbus Shares Dive

A Thunderbird pilot, ID'ed alternately as Thunderbird 5 or Thunderbird 6, (but not yet confirmed officially) ejected from his/her Lockheed Martin F-16CM-52-CF Fighting Falcon Wednesday (12-03-25) during a training mission in California. The accident occurred near Trona Airport on an unoccupied dry lake bed area south of the airport in San Bernardino County. The pilot ejected safely just before the airframe impacted the ground. Air India somehow misplaced a 43-year-old Boeing 737-200 and forgot about it for over a decade. The Kolkata airport didn’t forget about the airplane though, and continued to add parking fees. The airline was oblivious until recently, when it received a parking bill that, over a 13-year period, accumulated to a total of 10 million Indian Rupees, about USD$120,000. Dynon has released SkyView HDX software version 17.4,

Record Amounts of Cocaine Seized So Far…

The U.S. Coast Guard published a short video showing off a moment from a recent drug interdiction by the Cutter Munro, highlighting some impressive marksmanship from an airborne sniper. The Coast Guard has been hard at work this year, setting a historic record of drug seizures in FY2025. The video is exciting, as many of the Coast Guard’s interdictions are, because an aerial marksman aboard a hovering helo makes a perfect shot on the boat’s engine block from afar. This sort of thing happens all the time, but it's still interesting to see some first-person footage of it!

Ambitious Campaign Would Guarantee Preservation for Decades to Come

The Pearl Harbor Museum commemorated December 7th with a campaign to raise $51 million to restore the aging battlefield. Many elements are the original WWII units, but time is catching up to them. That funding will go towards ensuring Pearl Harbor exists for generations to come, to tell the stories of the fallen, and remind kids to come of those who came before. A 4-phase plan will start renovations and improvements in increasing fashion...

Also: SpaceX Starship Carries on, Hartzell Adds Lamar, Mar-a-Lago TFR Ooopppss, CAF Lobo Wing

The General Aviation Manufacturers Association issued the Third Quarter 2025 General Aviation Aircraft Shipping and Billing Report, covering results worldwide, and the result for the first nine months of 2025, when compared to the same period last year, show increased shipments in the business jet sector as well as an increase in the overall value of aircraft shipments. Airbus released an update on the deployment of precautionary fleet measures on its approximately 6,000 A320 family of aircraft. The actions were required after several aircraft experienced an unexpected loss of altitude and Airbus issued an Alert Operators Transmission (AOT). Upon inspection, Airbus engineers traced the anomalies to corrupted altitude data believed to be caused by intense solar radiation that affected software vulnerabilities feeding the altitude data to aircraft systems. N