Aviation Planet

Making headlines this week is a controller who brought his son to work in the ATC tower. Reactions run the gamut, but we'd like to hear yours. What was your take on the "kid in the control tower" story?Plus: Last week, we asked AVweb readers what stance GA should take toward the future of lead in avgas — and got a pretty clear answer. Click through to find out how your fellow readers answered.

A 41-year-old Swedish man who was about to pilot a Boeing 737 with 101 passengers aboard was arrested this week at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport for falsifying papers that had allowed him to fly for 13 years without valid certification. He had been flying for Corendon Airlines (Turkey) for two years, but said his career had spanned airlines in Belgium, Britain and Italy, and had allowed him to log more than 10,000 flight hours, by using falsified documents.

The NTSB announced Thursday that it will hold a public (and online) meeting March 9 to discuss a study on whether glass cockpits have improved the safety record of small light general aviation aircraft. The meeting will be held Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. ET at the NTSB Board Room and Conference Center, 429 L'Enfant Plaza, S.W., Washington, D.C., but will also be broadcast and archived online. The study was initiated to track the effects of recent, relatively swift and major changes in cockpit technology.

After seeing the illusion for themselves, authorities who launched a large-scale search last weekend to find a plane stuck in trees near Darwin Airport, Australia, said witnesses were right to report it. Multiple witnesses who contacted authorities last Sunday just after 6 p.m. local time claimed to have seen the plane through light rain as it sat stuck in mangroves. The "aircraft" is actually the meeting of two roof lines visible from a distance at a particular angle.