Every time a major aviation incident makes the news, you’ll hear investigators mention recovering “the black box.” It’s one of the most recognizable phrases in aviation safety, and also one of the most misleading. The device isn’t black, it isn’t a single box, and understanding what it actually does reveals a lot about how modern…
For more than five decades, flying faster than the speed of sound over American soil has been flatly illegal, regardless of how the noise actually reached the ground. That’s now changing. On June 30, 2026, the FAA proposed a new rule that would replace the blanket ban with a noise-based standard — a shift that could…