The most important piece of a memorial in Santa Monica, Calif., to the venerable DC-3 airplane arrived at the city’s municipal airport last week. A crane lifted the fuselage of a DC-3 painted in special “Spirit of Santa Monica” livery onto support columns arranged to make the plane appear to be climbing into the air, the Los Angeles Times reported. The monument will include plaques with information about the aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company, which was located at the old Clover Field on the site of the present-day airport. Douglas manufactured about 11,000 DC-3s at Clover Field and the planes became a mainstay of early airline fleets in the 1930s and 1940s. Though the monument has the city’s blessing, it was paid for with private contributions.

The Bombardier Dash-8 Q400 that crashed on approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport Thursday night had a thick accumulation of ice on it and dropped quickly in the seconds before it crashed, investigators said. But National Transportation Safety Board officials cautioned that it was too soon to say icing caused the crash, the New York Times reported. The Colgan Air flight was operating as Continental Connection flight 3207 from Newark to Buffalo; all 49 people on board and one person on the ground died when it plunged into a house and quickly burned in a raging fire.  Radar data indicate the plane fell 800 feet in five seconds immediately before the crash, an equivalent descent rate of 9,600 feet per minute, the NTSB said Sunday. Other aircraft in the area reported icing conditions after the accident but no other flights had problems; one Northwest flight requested a continuous climb because of icing conditions, according to a recording of Buffalo Approach and Tower saved by LiveATC.net. The Colgan Air flight appeared to hit the ground in a nearly flat orientation, investigators said, even though witnesses reported seeing the plane nosedive. According to information from the flight data recorder, the plane traveled through 70 degrees of pitch and 150 degrees of roll in all directions after the flight crew extended the plane’s flaps and landing gear.

While the cause of Thursday’s Colgan Air crash near Buffalo is far from being decided, many critics are calling on the FAA to tighten rules governing when turboprops can fly into icing conditions. The NTSB has pointed out that four of its recommendations related to icing — two of them a decade old — have gone unaddressed by the FAA, the Buffalo News reported. The safety board asked the FAA in 1997 to overhaul its criteria for known-icing certification. While committees have reviewed the process and issued reports and recommendations, the FAA has taken few steps. One rule was changed in 2007 but many other efforts never led to rule changes, the NTSB has said. One persistent FAA critic, former NTSB chairman Jim Hall, called on the agency to ground all Q400s until the accident investigation is finished. FAA officials countered that by saying there is no evidence yet to indicate a broader safety problem with the Q400. And Colgan Air, among other operators, is already following suggestions from the NTSB that pilots enable de-icing equipment as soon as they enter icing conditions. The de-ice boots on Thursday night’s Colgan flight were activated 11 minutes after takeoff from Newark and stayed on for the rest of the flight.

Among the $789 billion in the final version of the economic stimulus bill expected to get President Obama’s signature today is $1.1 billion for airport construction projects. The FAA will divvy up the funds based on how quickly airports can start work on the projects for which they request money, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association reported. While Airport Improvement Program grants often require local governments to pitch in a small amount in matching funding, the grants that are part of the stimulus bill don’t have that requirement. That’s good for cities and counties, since they won’t have to come up with money on their own if their grants are selected. A separate bill introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives last week to fund the FAA for the next four years contains wording that would create a new FAA office to review complaints from whistleblowers. The agency came under fire last year when employees where reprimanded for voicing concerns about everything from maintenance to air traffic control procedures, the Federal Times reported. The whistleblower office, if created, would process and review complaints, making recommendations to the agency as needed. The $70 billion funding bill would keep the FAA running for the next four years, using increased fuel taxes to help pay for modernization programs. The bill is very similar to a 2007 funding bill that the U.S. House approved. It does not contain user fees and it is widely supported by many sectors of the aviation industry.

No one was hurt when a Cessna 150 made an emergency landing on Interstate 80 west of Salt Lake City Feb. 4 when it ran out of fuel. But the owner of the plane could face criminal charges for allegedly filling up the plane’s tanks several hours later and, in the cover of night, using I-80 as a runway to take off again, Salt Lake City NBC affiliate KSL reported. The owner allegedly flew the Cessna back to its base at an airport about 30 miles south of Salt Lake City. Police who responded to the plane on I-80 told the owner to hire a truck to tow the plane back to its airport and specifically told him not to fly it away. But the next day, the plane was gone and no truck had ever been sent to the scene, authorities say. The owner, who was not piloting the plane when it made the emergency landing, could face charges of reckless endangerment.

At least two geese were sucked into the engines of US Airways flight 1549 minutes after its departure from New York LaGuardia Airport on Jan. 15, the National Transportation Safety Board now says. The finding comes after the Smithsonian Institution conducted a DNA analysis on samples of bird feathers and other parts recovered from the engines. All of the samples were from Canada geese, though the NTSB isn’t ready to say exactly how many geese the engines ingested. Geese typically weigh from five to 11 pounds, making the birds heavier than the largest bird that the engines would have had to ingest during certification tests. The limit on those engines, certified in 1996, is that they must be able to ingest a four-pound bird without catching fire or sending pieces of metal through the engine case. The flight crew of US Airways flight 1549 gained international media attention for their ability to land the plane on the Hudson River and evacuate all 155 people on board without any serious injuries. The captain of the flight is a certificated glider pilot.

Piper Aircraft announced a second round of layoffs Tuesday, slashing 300 more workers from its payroll on top of the 150 positions it cut last month. The company, like many other general aviation manufacturers, says orders are coming in far slower than expected, making it unrealistic to keep production lines running at normal speeds when there are no buyers waiting for planes, the Palm Beach Post reported. The two rounds of layoffs amount to a 40-percent reduction in the number of employees at Piper since last summer. The company is bracing for a drop in sales of more than 40 percent this year compared to its original predictions. In addition to the second round of layoffs, Piper will shut its plant down for a week in April and a week in July, and the production line workers who remain have been limited to four-day work weeks. Because of the cuts, Piper is not expecting to receive nearly $11 million from local governments that it would have been eligible for under an agreement signed last year that kept the company in Vero Beach, Fla. Piper would have to have 1,166 workers on its payroll to get its money, but after this round of layoffs it will have just 650.

Cirrus Design, already running its production lines at half of their capacity, said it may need to scale back its work week for many production employees in the face of sluggish sales. The company has 100 employees on furlough who are receiving benefits, but it won’t say when those workers will be called back to their jobs, the Duluth News Tribune reported. Cirrus said it would adjust its production schedule from week to week, and that it is leery to lay off any of its workers permanently for fear of losing highly training assembly line employees. Cirrus isn’t the only company slowing down its production lines. Cessna said starting later this week, employees working on subassembly lines will have their hours limited to three or four days per week, the Wichita Business Journal reported. Officials wouldn’t say how many workers would be affected by the changes, which are expected to last at least through March. Other production line reductions are possible, the company said.

With more than seven months left in its fiscal year, the FAA has already met its target for hiring new controllers this year. Counting those in training, the agency now has about 15,500 air traffic controllers in its ranks, though it could be two to three years before all of the new hires are trained and certified, the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization reported. With about 9,000 applicants in the hiring pool, the agency expects to keep well ahead of its hiring needs for the foreseeable future. With President Obama’s coming to office, some controllers who are eligible to retire are now waiting a bit longer in hopes that the agency will reach a new labor agreement. The FAA credits its revamped training program with failing fewer new hires as one of the reasons it is ahead of schedule. As recently as two years ago, air traffic control facilities across the nation were severely understaffed. Controllers hired after the 1981 PATCO strike were nearing retirement age, and a set of work rules imposed in 2006 sped up the rate of attrition.

Wrapping up four days of hearings last week, there was no mistaking that members of the National Transportation Safety Board are growing impatient with the safety record among air ambulance flights. The 28 deaths in air ambulance crashes last year made 2008 the deadliest on record for the industry, but many operators and the FAA are resistant to requiring that safety equipment like night vision goggles and terrain awareness systems be installed in helicopters, the Houston Chronicle reported. Many crashes happen at night and in poor weather, with pilots loosing their bearings or striking obstacles. The FAA has suggested the industry adopt safety standards on its own, which would be faster than the traditional rulemaking process. But many medical helicopter operators have been slow to make changes because installing new equipment or adding a second pilot to flights would be costly. One of the underlying problems, the NTSB believes, is that air ambulance flights have become a competitive business. The number of operators has increased almost 10-fold in the last 20 years, putting pressure on pilots to accept risky missions. The NTSB has not released any formal recommendations as a result of last week’s hearings, but it is likely to do so.