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NEW DELHI: With reports that spotting of unmanned aircraft or drones in the restricted airspace near airports was rapidly increasing, the government is mulling raising a separate unit to counter the remotely operated birds that can put lives of fliers at risk if they collide with commercial flights.Sources said the Civil Aviation Ministry was working on a proposal to create anti-drone “command centres” at major airports to deal with the risk to air traffic. Small drones flying at low altitudes had recently triggered concerns at some busy airports. A senior official said the aviation ministry was in touch with at least 10 top foreign companies to set up anti-drone command centres, which will be known as “drone war rooms”. The first point being worked on is how to cripple a drone’s radio signal, with its operator probably sitting miles away from the airport.   We are exploring the possibility of jamming signals to bring down the number of drones flying near airports. The talks w...

Shares of  Neah Power Systems ( NPWZ) are moving on volatility today  -14.29% or $ -0.00010 from the open.  The   OTC listed company  saw a recent bid of $ 0.0006 and  15313388 shares have traded hands in the session. Investors might be looking at their stock holdings and trying to gauge which ones will break out to new highs. Many investors will keep a close eye on stocks that are trading near popular marks such as the 52-week high. Stocks trading near 52-week lows also tend to garner additional attention. When a stock is flirting with a new 52-week high, investors may have to decide whether to cash in to lock in profits or wait to see if a breakthrough is going to happen. Companies that are teetering near the 52-week low may be worth taking a look at. Studying the fundamentals may show that the stock should be performing better than it is. This might be the time to think about purchasing shares that for whatever reason may have falle...

There have been reports that a taxiing private jet was burgled on the taxiway of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos runway. Questions have been asked on the possibility of such incident happening. Many officials involved in the business aviation and who are familiar with the movement of aircraft from the private jet facilities to the runway, seriously doubt that such incident could be a possibility. According to them, if it is true that incident really happened, it would be a serious breach on the security apparatus of the airport. The Chairman of Quits Aviation Services Limited, the only authorised private jet terminal in Lagos, Sam Iwuajoku, however, confirmed the possibility of such incident as similar incidents have taken place after the initial report.  On Tuesday, a private jet carrying two Nigerian musical artists were reportedly attacked and robbed on the runway of the Lagos airport. Iwuajoku, who has access to the footage of the aircraft movement t...

CHINA has warned Japan to “act prudently” after reports of the country’s possible intention to buy stealth fighter "jump jets" for its latest warships. Japan is forbidden from having aircraft carriers as part of their constitution which was created by the US following World War II.  China has warned Japan over its reported intention to buy F-35B stealth fighters. File picture showing South Korean-owned F35B jets As a result, their current warships are called “helicopter destroyers” and do not carry fixed-wing aircraft – at least not yet. It’s been a tenuous splitting of hairs ever since the Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force introduced its new 25,000 ton flat-topped aviation ships to service in recent years. Now Japan is reportedly considering abandoning the pretence. It is reportedly considering the purchase of US jump-jet F-35B stealth fighters and the modification of its Izumo-class ships to operate them. Japan's warship Izumo - which currently only carries ...

IG report: United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, and ULA subcontractor Aerojet Rocketdyne “did not perform adequate quality assurance management of the EELV program." WASHINGTON — An evaluation of military space launch services revealed lapses in quality control that could compromise the schedule and performance of future missions, the Defense Department inspector general reported last week. The IG specifically called out the main contractors that support the evolved expendable launch vehicle program, or EELV, for failing to comply with standards required by AS9100 — a widely adopted quality management system for the aviation and space industries. Prime contractors United Launch Alliance (ULA) and SpaceX, and ULA subcontractor Aerojet Rocketdyne “did not perform adequate quality assurance management of the EELV program,” said the Dec. 20 report signed by Randolph Stone, deputy inspector general for policy and oversight. Auditors flagged the contractors for 181 “nonconformities” i...

The year began and ended with two words that would define much of the business and political headlines of the intervening 12 months — Brexit and Trump. Brexit was a huge issue that placed Ireland squarely in the firing between the UK and Europe. The inauguration of US president Donald Trump put the focus on his campaign pledge to cut corporation tax and repatriate the offshore billions from American companies in “places like Ireland”. As the year gathered momentum, businesses large and small cast a weather eye to the 2017 horizon with an uneasy caution on what the coming months might bring.  The Irish economy was predicted to outperform the EU for the fifth year in a row. Investec Ireland named its favoured stock for 2017, indicating CRH, Bank of Ireland, PaddyPower, Betfair, Ryanair, and Smurfit Kappa to be the best placed of the large listed companies. Among the SMEs, CPL, Dalata, Irish Continental Group, Grafton, and Greencore were its top picks. Plans to unveil direct fligh...

The Irish Aviation Authority has asked search-and-rescue and other pilots to help correct the aeronautical charts they use. Lighthouses in the wrong locations, missing spot heights and obscured symbols are among the errors in the authority’s latest visual-flight-rules 1:500,000 chart, published last June, it has conceded. The Air Accident Investigation Unit highlighted errors and anomalies in navigational information and systems in a preliminary report on the loss of all four crew when the Irish Coast Guard’s Rescue 116 helicopter crashed into Blackrock Island, off north Co Mayo, on March 14th. The aviation authority invited pilots earlier this month to report any errors or make suggestions for future editions of visual-flight-rules charts, which are used most frequently by search-and-rescue, helicopter-transport and recreational pilots. It says it plans to hold a “charting workshop” in January to review submissions and correct errors before the next chart is published, in April. ...

Officials expanded evacuation orders Monday as an Indonesian volcano continued to erupt, spewing ash nearly 10,000 feet into the atmosphere. Bali's Ngurah Rai International Airport was forced to close as a result of the eruptions, stranding tens of thousands of travelers. Mount Agung's eruptions could be heard as far as 7.5 miles away. Mudflows of volcanic debris and water known as a lahar were seen rushing down the mountain in videos released by the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. The organization also said lahars could continue, as it is the island's rainy season, and warned people to stay away from rivers.  The agency raised the volcano's alert to the highest level early Monday and expanded the danger zone to 6 miles in places from the previous 4.7 miles. It said a larger eruption is possible. Spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho told a news conference in Jakarta that the extension of the danger zone affects 22 villages and about 90,000 to 100,000 p...

After a short inquiry into the UK’s acquisition of Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning II stealth fighters, a watchdog body of the British Parliament has issued a detailed and critical report. The House of Commons Defence Committee (HCDC) said it was disappointed by the responses it obtained in written and oral testimony from Lockheed Martin and UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials. The HCDC report was published just days before the 14th F-35B for the UK was delivered to MCAS Beaufort, South Carolina, where the first operational British squadron is working up. The HCDC’s inquiry was prompted by serious program failings and cost escalations that were alleged by The Times daily national newspaper last July. The newspaper repeated the F-35 shortcomings that have been reported in public U.S. documents such asDirector of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E)and Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports. But it also quoted British defense sources, some anonymously, on UK-specific ...

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is laying out his vision for privatizing the nation’s air traffic control system on Monday, arguing that it will enhance safety and modernize aviation. Trump will push for the separation of air traffic control operations from the Federal Aviation Administration, adopting an approach long championed by U.S. airlines, according to White House officials. Trump is expected to be joined by airline industry executives, union members and former transportation secretaries Elizabeth Dole and Mary Peters in an East Room address to make the case for a more modern air traffic control system. “We’re really moving into the modern decade of technology in air traffic control. It’s a system where everyone benefits from this,” White House economic adviser Gary Cohn said in a conference call with reporters. Trump’s budget plan released earlier this year called for the changes, placing air traffic operations under an “independent, nongovernmental orga...

Web-based software developer Sutton Integrated has launched an online aircraft dashboard for owners and operators. Called My Aircraft Reporting System (Mars), it provides a microsite for each aircraft that allows owners and operators to view, in real time, operational expenses, flight activity and charter revenue in both textual and graphical forms. Sutton initially developed the software for a Toronto-based aircraft charter and management firm that wanted a better way to generate reports for owners of managed aircraft. Mars is Sutton’s first foray into aviation software, though it has 20 years of web-based software design experience. At present, data can be imported from most accounting and flight operational software, including FOS, Bart, QuickBooks and SAP. Company president Gord Sutton told AIN that it is working to allow aircraft data from Avinode and other flight scheduling software to be imported into Mars. The reports, which can be customized for aircraft o...

Because fuel is a major expense in the aviation world, officials with the FuelPlus Group say it is in an airline's best interest to seek an efficient, streamlined fueling process to keep related costs as minimal as possible. Klaus-Peter Warnke, CEO at FuelPlus, explains that saving 2 to 3 percent on fuel costs can be equivalent to selling hundreds of thousands of passenger tickets when looking at an airline’s annual bottom line. As a result, FuelPlus has taken a larger view on the entire aviation fuel management process, looking for ways to help its customer’s reduce operating costs. “Fuel is something that is an enterprise-wide process for suppliers. When we look into the airlines, we have different activities around fuel,” Warnke says. These activities include preparation processes, including both volume planning and budget planning. Then there are several tender activities to ensure that the fuel required for different locations is available. That leads to su...

The mobile expansion of real time information continues to increase as today’s pilot boards their aircraft with an electronic tablet loaded with the most useful navigation and weather apps — and may include a flight simulation game.  Here are great apps that we love:  Ten: Instagram Yes, the social media site has taken off and is the top place to receive updates and media from aviation’s top military and civilian pilots or airshow teams. 2017 has seen a strong increase in the way military, commercial, and private pilots have put their in-flight short videos, images, and while including updated information. Nine: My Radar Weather Radar is likely the most used live radar we’ve seen by pilots and airport personnel across the United States, Europe, and Japan. My Radar displays animated weather, and its pinch and swipe display allows app owners the ability to zoom in on a two mile stretch of weather. The app uses your phone’s gyros and GPS to accurately pinpoint your location f...

The Director General of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, NAPTIP, Julie Okah-Donli, has disclosed that more than 25,000 Nigerians have been held in slave and sex camps in Libya. Ms. Okah-Donli made this known while defending the agency’s 2018 budget before the Senate Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights, and Legal Matters on Tuesday. She said of the figure,  about 5000 of the victims were repatriated within the period. ”A large number of Nigerians have also been returned from other countries in Europe and Africa." ”All these people need to be properly received, profiled and assisted." ”NAPTIP has been working in conjunction with other governmental and non-governmental agencies such as NEMA, International Organisation for Migration (IOM) and others to provide help to these unfortunate Nigerians,” she said. She lamented that in spite of the evils of human trafficking, not so much attention was focused on the menace. She sai...

a software-based hyper-local weather forecasting company, announced that the company has closed $15 million in Series A funding. ClimaCell creates proprietary weather observation data from wireless networks that then feed into its models. The results pinpoint weather prediction down to city-block-level granularity in real-time and at one minute intervals 0-6 hours in the future for businesses and government agencies. Canaan led the financing round with participation from Fontinalis Partners, as well as existing investor Square Peg Capital. The latest investment will be used to accelerate ClimaCell’s expansion outside of the U.S., speed product development efforts and support new hires. “Nearly $3 trillion of the U.S. economy’s GDP is at risk due to weather every year and ClimaCell’s technology is poised to help verticals like aviation, insurance, financial services, logistics and defense change tha...

Three people were taken to a hospital after a small plane crashed in the front yard of an East Knoxville home on Tuesday afternoon Caitie McMekin/News Sentinel Three men were taken to a hospital after a small plane crashed in the front yard of an East Knoxville home on Tuesday afternoon, authorities said. The plane landed on top of a car in the driveway at 1114 Groner Drive, in the Morningside neighborhood just east of downtown Knoxville. The crash was reported to E-911 at 3:18 p.m. A small plane sits crashed into a tree and surrounding vehicles on Groner Drive in East Knoxville ...more A small plane sits crashed into a tree and surrounding vehicles on Groner Drive in East Knoxville Tuesday Dec. 19, 2017. The three people in the plane were taken to University of Tennessee Medical Center. (Caitie McMekin/Knoxville News Sentinel via AP) Caitie McMekin/News Sentinel The men managed to get out of the plane on their own and were "conscious and alert" w...

Actress Helen has revealed the tough time she’s had in her second pregnancy so far thanks to the same crippling morning sickness that struck the Duchess of Cambridge down in hers

MUMBAI: Creating a new world record for single-runway operations, Mumbai airport handled 969 take-offs and landings in 24 hours on Friday. It broke its own record of 935, said a Mumbai International Airport Ltd spokesperson (MIAL). Mega cities such as New York, London, Dubai and Delhi have airports with two or more runways that operate simultaneously. Though Mumbai has two runways, they criss-cross each other, so only one runway is used at a time. Technically this puts Mumbai in the single-runway airport category. So it's in the league of busy single-runway secondary airports of cities like London (Gatwick, Stansted airports), Istanbul (Sabiha Gokcen airport) and major airports of smaller cities like San Diego (US), Fukuoka (Japan) and Xiamen (China). Mumbai handles over 900 airline flights per day. The record high air traffic movement (take-offs and landings) happen on days when the number of unscheduled flights-charter aircraft, private aircraft-go up, like it did on Friday. ...

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said a fire at the main substation powering the airport triggered the outage, which caused the Federal Aviation Administration to put a ground stop in place, slowing or halting inbound air traffic. ATLANTA — A power outage brought the world's busiest airport to a standstill Sunday, ruining holiday travel for thousands and threatening another day of headaches, with hundreds of flights on Monday already canceled. Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta lost power shortly after 1 p.m. ET on Sunday, leaving passengers trapped inside airport terminals and some in planes on the tarmac for hours. By late Sunday, the airport had canceled 1,173 flights and delayed 207, according to FlightAware.com. Delta Air Lines, which is headquartered in Atlanta, said it was canceling another 300 flights, mostly to Atlanta, on Monday. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said a fire at the main substation powering the airport triggered the outage, which caused the Federal...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. jury on Friday found the former chief executive of mobile aggregation company Mobile Messenger guilty of defrauding mobile phone customers by charging them millions of dollars for unwanted text messages. Darcy Wedd, 40, was convicted in Manhattan federal court of wire fraud and conspiracy charges after a two-week trial, the office of Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim in Manhattan said. The charges each carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison, according to Kim's office. Robert Caliendo, a lawyer for Wedd, declined to comment on the verdict, which came after Wedd's third trial. The first two ended with hung juries. Prosecutors accused Wedd and several other people of signing up phone customers for paid text messaging services without their consent. They said the scheme resulted in hundreds of thousands of customers being charged more than $100 million for text messages that included trivia, horoscopes and celebrity gossip.

Temperatures plunged to the lowest levels in five years overnight, as exposed northerly areas experienced -15C and other areas temperatures were between freezing and -10C.  A Met Office warning for snow and ice in Scotland and eastern England is in force until 11am today, and a separate ice warning is in place for southern England and Northern Ireland.  Commuters continue to face tricky travelling conditions on Tuesday morning amid warnings of ice, frost and lying snow as forecasters warned that lying snow would have turned into ice overnight.  The wintry conditions follow on from a cold and bitter weekend which saw almost 12 inches of snow fall over the Brecon Beacons in Wales and up to three inches in the capital.  Temperatures plummeted to -12C in Northumberland on Sunday night and flights were disrupted out of major airports over the weekend, including Luton, Birmingham, Cardiff and Heathrow. The disruption continued into Monday with dozens of flights can...

deadly crash of a small plane, Molokai can claim half of Hawaii's fatal air wrecks over the last six years. National Transportation Safety Board records show that six of the state's 12 fatal air crashes occurred in and around Molokai, with four of them happening in just the last 14 months. While each incident involves its own set of circumstances, veteran Hawaii commercial pilot Rob Moore said the island does present particular challenges for aviators. Moore, president of the General Aviation Council of Hawaii, said Molokai, for one, does not offer good radar coverage, with pilots flying on their own below 3,000 feet. In addition, the weather can be a big problem, especially this time of year, he said. Clouds can build up fast in and around the mountainous northeast side of the island. While the airport at Hoolehua does have a weather reporting system, it is not as sophisticated as ones found elsewhere, Moore said. "If you get outside of 5 miles from the airpor...

The Debt Management Office (DMO) has announced that as part of the preparations towards the issuance of the first Sovereign Green Bond, it would sensitise prospective investors in the Bond through a Roadshow in Abuja and Lagos on December 14 and 15, 2017. The offer, which is for N10.69 billion is expected to be advertised in various media including newspapers and the DMO’s website to enable the public subscribe to the Bonds. The Green Bond is being issued following Nigeria’s endorsement of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change on September 21, 2016. The Paris Agreement aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of Climate Change. Since the signing of the Agreement, various countries who are parties to the Agreement have initiated several steps aimed at making the environment better. The Green Bond proceeds will be used to finance projects in the 2017 Appropriation Act that have been certified as Green because of their positive effects on the environment. ...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The United States is urgently calling for clarity on which aviation safety regime the British aerospace industry will operate under after the country leaves the European Union, to avoid increased certification costs for airlines and manufacturers. The Union Flag and a European Union flag fly near the Elizabeth Tower, housing the Big Ben bell, during the anti-Brexit 'People's March for Europe', in Parliament Square in central London, Britain September 9, 2017. REUTERS/Tolga Akmen The head of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in London and Brussels for talks with both sides on whether Britain can retain a role in the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and said the FAA needed clarity on that by early next year. “The UK’s status (within EASA) does evaporate upon exit from the EU so the question becomes ‘what is going to replace it?'” Michael Huerta told reporters before meeting with the EU executive, the European Commission. ...