Last week’s Paris Air Show gave Airbus a chance to gloat on several fronts, as it tallied 58 firm aircraft orders for the week – well beyond the two firm orders Boeing pull in but less than a quarter of last year’s tally for Airbus at Farnborough, England. And Airbus said it remains in a strong position to bid on the U.S. Air Force’s forthcoming midair refueling tanker contract, the London Telegraph reported. Airbus plans to again offer a modified A330, which would be built in Alabama. Boeing said it would give the Air Force a choice of a modified 767 or larger 777. The latter would likely be more expensive, but would be able to hold more fuel and cargo than the A330. Last fall, the Air Force withdrew the contract after awarding it to Airbus, when the Department of Defense found that Boeing had been unfairly penalized in scoring the competing offerings. But Airbus remains confident it will prevail again in a contract that could mean $35 billion of revenue for one of the companies in the coming years.

While vacation bookings to Cape Cod are off 30 percent for this summer compared to last year, executives at the regional carrier Cape Air aren’t too worried about the drop. The airline, which operates a fleet of twin-engine Cessna 402s, is cutting flights on some of its vacation routes and using the planes to expand service to Baltimore, White Plains and New Hampshire, the Provincetown Banner reported. Cape Air is considering enlarging its Caribbean and Florida service, and may even expand to Cuba if travel restrictions there are lifted. Cape Air hasn’t laid off any of its 700 employees in the current downturn. A bigger concern is what to do with its aging fleet of 402s, which company executives expect have 10 to 15 more years of life in them. With the 402 out of production, Cape Air has been buying up used ones to scrap for parts. The airline hasn’t settled on a replacement aircraft for its fleet, but it wants to stick with a smaller plane like the 402, which seats nine passengers.

The two pilots flying Continental Connection flight 3407 when it crashed near Buffalo, N.Y., in February may have slept in the crew lounge at Newark before the flight and one commuted overnight from Seattle the night before. Those and other details into the flight emerged during three days of National Transportation Safety Board hearings last week, shining a bright light on the grueling schedules pilots for regional airlines must maintain, the New York Times reported. Colgan Air, which operated the Continental Connection flight, said at the hearings that Capt. Marvin Renslow made about $55,000 per year and that First Officer Rebecca Shaw earned $25,000 annually. But the NTSB calculated, based on the number of hours in her logbook, that Shaw was actually earning just $16,000 per year, since pay is based on the number of hours in the air. The hearing also focused on whether Shaw may have been sick and whether Renslow had ever received training on how the Bombardier Q400’s stick shaker and stick pusher worked – both devices made to prevent a stall. What the cockpit voice recorder transcripts made clear was that both pilots violated sterile cockpit rules during the approach and neither appeared to notice that the plane was loosing airspeed in the seconds before it stalled. The CVR also captured a conversation between the two pilots in which Shaw said she had never flown in icing conditions and was worried about doing so; the plane crashed in an area of light to moderate icing.

An Air Force staff sergeant flying a civilian flight from Chicago to Tokyo last month spotted a fuel leak that could have put the plane in dire straits. Staff Sgt. Bartek Bachleda, who is a midair refueling boom operator, had a window seat and noticed fuel streaming out from underneath the wing of the Boeing 747 soon into the flight, the Air Force reported. He shot video of the fuel leak and alerted a flight attendant, who initially was unconcerned. A few minutes later, with fuel continuing to stream out from the wing, Bachleda identified himself as an Air Force officer and told the flight attendant that it was an emergency situation. The captain of the flight came back to Bachleda’s seat and soon after seeing the fuel leak, turned the plane toward San Francisco, where it landed uneventfully. The Air Force did not list the airline Bachleda was flying or the date he flew, though a picture of the fuel leak shows the plane’s winglet painted in United Airlines’ livery. A search of Flight Aware’s previous flight plans shows that on April 18, United flight 881, which flies daily from Chicago O’Hare to Tokyo Narita, made an abrupt turn over the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border for San Francisco instead.

An airport in Phoenix and one in Louisiana are the newest recipients of federal funding to help upgrade them from their former use as military bases. Phoenix-Mesa Gateway and Alexandria International Airport will share $23.7 million this year with 10 airports already receiving the funds, according to the FAA. At Alexandria, the funding will pay to overhaul an aging and outdated fuel farm. The airport supports daily commercial flights to Houston, Dallas, Memphis and Atlanta. Phoenix-Mesa will use its share of the funding to upgrade a small passenger terminal that quickly become overwhelmed when Allegiant Air began flights to the airport in late 2007. The airport recorded 120,000 passenger boardings in the first nine months of last year, due in large part to Allegiant’s flights. The Military Airport Program funding is a subset of the money available through the Airport Improvement Program.

This time last year, American Airlines was forced to ground its fleet of MD-80 jets to fix problems with how the planes had been repaired, stranding tens of thousands of travelers and costing the airline millions of dollars. A year later, American is being subjected to a three-month audit of its maintenance practices as the FAA cracks down on maintenance and other issues, the Dallas Morning News reported. Most recently, the agency discovered that thrust reversers on American’s fleet of Boeing 777s weren’t reassembled correctly, and that mechanics were using the wrong tool to pack emergency slides in some other aircraft. While the airline is complaining about having to comply with the strictest letter of the law, it hasn’t had to ground large portions of its fleet, either, due to the FAA’s willingness to give the airline a flexible repair schedule. The new oversight comes after the FAA came under the gun last year for letting airlines get away with maintenance lapses.

The global economy is undoubtedly putting the damper on commercial air travel, causing the FAA to adjust its figures for growth over the next 16 years. It will be 2021 before airlines carry 1 billion passengers, the FAA said in its annual aviation forecast. Last year’s forecast called for hitting that mark in 2016. Growth in passengers will climb each year by about 3 percent – though the agency expects a drop of about 9 percent in passenger loadings this year. Because so many carriers have cut capacity by grounding aircraft, passenger counts won’t rebound quickly once the recession ends, the FAA predicts. Once it does, the number of flight operations grows at the meager pace of 1.5 percent each year. The total number of operations will drop to about 55 million at airports this year and then slowly rise to about 68 million by 2025, the end of the 16-year forecast period.

The NTSB is downplaying the role icing played in the Feb. 12 crash of a turboprop that killed 50 people as it approached Buffalo, N.Y. The board’s investigation so far has found that the plane would have encountered light or moderate icing, but that would have had a “minimal impact on the stall speed of the airplane.” And the NTSB’s latest update confirms earlier reports that one of the pilots pulled back sharply on the control column when the stick-shaker engaged. The NTSB will hold a hearing in May to review many aspects of the accident. Besides icing and weather, the board is reviewing the flight crew’s actions, training, recent flights and fatigue, as well as looking more broadly at Colgan Air’s training programs and other procedures for pilots.

Anchorage International Airport remained closed for much of the day Sunday as a thin layer of ash from Mount Redoubt, 100 miles away, covered the airport and the city. Redoubt began erupting intermittently a week ago and erupted twice on Saturday, cancelling dozens of flights at Anchorage and sending cargo flights to Seattle instead, the Associated Press reported. The volcanic eruption came as politicians seized on $140 million in the federal stimulus package tagged for volcano monitoring. But pilots and geologists in Alaska haven’t had to do much to defend the benefits of that system in the last week. The instruments gave scientists a heads-up that an eruption was imminent, allowing pilots to steer clear of the region (a temporary flight restriction had been in place above the volcano for several months). Even before it was clear exactly how much ash had been ejected or where it would travel, many airlines cancelled flights and parked planes in hangars. The last time Redoubt erupted, in 1989, a KLM flight passed through the ash cloud and had all four of its engines fail. The plane descended more than 10,000 feet before the pilots could restart the engines and make an emergency landing in Anchorage; the plane required millions of dollars of repairs to its engines. So far, there have been no aviation accidents or incidents as a result of Redoubt’s most recent eruptions.

By 2015, the nation’s busiest airports are supposed to have 1,000-foot safety zones at the ends of each runway under a new Congressional mandate. But 11 airports, including those in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and New York City, may have difficulty meeting the requirement, the Los Angeles Times reported. Part of the issue is that the process of designing and approving fixes – including getting support from nearby residents – can take a decade or longer. The rules require each end of the runway to have an unobstructed safety buffer 1,000 feet long and 500 feet wide. At many of the problem airports, busy roads, businesses and homes are within that safety zone. A stopgap measure could involve repainting runways to provide displaced thresholds that would effectively provide the needed buffer. But that would shorten the runway’s useable length and could prevent large aircraft from using such a runway. According to a federal report on the issue, 12 people have died and 200 have been injured in the last 10 years in 75 incidents that involved a plane overrunning the end of a runway.