The Top Aviation Stories Of 2022

In a move that surprised everyone, the FAA this fall approved the use of GAMI's 100UL fuel essentially fleetwide for piston-powered light planes. The approval was a godsend, as the window for developing and delivering a new sufficiently high-octane unleaded fuel was closing fast. And with the Santa Clara decision still clearly in the rearview, the availability of 100UL will provide a safety cushion at airports where low lead becomes unavailable. The approval is not by any stretch an immediate fix, as it will take years for the company, working with AvFuel, one of the largest avgas distributors in the United States, to roll out the fuel nationwide.

With the pandemic waning but surely not gone, EAA's Oshkosh AirVenture was back to business as usual, and the event was a huge coming out party for aviation, with record attendance and perfect weather for the week. The airshows were spectacular; EAA celebrated the AirVenture unveiling of its impressive Education Center, which will help train pilots and inspire young people all year long; and the industry news was great, too, with vendor after vendor reporting strong sales and high interest.

A sad note at EAA happened on Day One, when news came out that former longtime EAA president Tom Poberezny, son of EAA founder Paul Poberezny, passed away unexpectedly following a short illness. EAA responded with a weeklong tribute to Tom's tremendous contributions to the organization and the event. He was a champion aerobatic performer and a member of the world-renowned Eagles aerobatic performance team--- this in addition to running EAA. During his tenure, Tom was in charge of the Fly-In and attracted a world-class level of demonstration aircraft, including Concorde. He also founded the EAA Aviation Museum, started the wildly successful Young Eagles youth flight initiative and much, much more.

Tragedy struck the opening day of a STOL in Wayne, Nebraska, when a popular backcountry flyer, Tom Dafoe, was killed when he lost control of the 1946 Cessna 140 he was flying. The crash was witnessed by dozens of people at the Wayne MayDay STOL event. The remainder of the competition, which was scheduled to run through the weekend, was canceled following the crash. Dafoe, who worked at jetAviva and who had worked for Textron Aviation for many years prior to that, was 45. He is survived by his wife, five children and one grandchild. The crash happened in an ad hoc event that was more like a conventional short takeoff and landing than the planned STOL Drag event, in which the participating aircraft compete in a low-level out-and-back drag race.

Even before Oshkosh '22, where the new model was supposed to have been unveiled, the existence of the first Van's high-wing plane, the RV-15, was no secret. Rumors had been floating around for years that the Oregon kit giant was considering a high-wing model, in part, people assumed, to capitalize on the great interest in backcountry flying. Then, a couple of weeks before AirVenture, a spy video emerged of a high-wing plane flying around Van's home airport, Aurora State in Oregon, and everybody assumed, correctly, as it turned out, that the plane in question was the much-rumored new highwinger from Van's. With the cat effectively out of the bag, Van's came clean in advance of the Oshkosh AirVenture fly-in and revealed the existence of the RV-15. Few details are public yet, other than that it will be a kit-built, noexcuses backcountry plane built tough and with plenty of power.

At Oshkosh AirVenture, Yakima, Washington-based backcountry aircraft manufacturer CubCrafters announced that it would go public, making a stock offering through a program designed for smaller companies. Plane & Pilot spoke with CubCrafters' Brad Damm at AirVenture, and he told us that the offering's early days were the hottest such opening its management company had ever had. Damm said that following the death of founder Jim Richmond in 2021, CubCrafters wanted to keep the company's interests close to home, and it weighed all of its options before deciding on this route. Among other possible plans for the funding that's to come, Damm said increasing production capacity for the maxed-out Yakima factory is tops on the list, with new plane development being another priority.

When Textron Aviation unveiled its engine plans for its single-engine turboprop, the Denali, the chosen powerplant, the GE Catalyst engine, was still a work in progress. Its targeted much lower fuel burns coupled with a first for a turboprop---automatic digital power control---made a splash. After delays, the engine was finally FAA approved this year, but in the meantime, Pratt & Whitney has unveiled automatic power control, known as FADEC (full authority digital engine control) on a couple models of its ubiquitous PT-6 turboprop engine. And Daher announced that it was, indeed, using just such an engine on its brand-new Daher TBM 960, which was unveiled at Sun ’n Fun in April.

Textron Aviation purchased Slovenian aircraft maker Pipistrel for $236 million. In announcing the deal, Textron described Pipistrel as "an award-winning pioneer and global leader in electrically powered aircraft." It is widely believed that the company plans to introduce an electric trainer model based on the all-electric Pipistrel Velis Electro, which is certified in Europe. There has, however, been no news from the Wichita planemaker about its emerging plans for the trainer.

In an unexpected move, early this year FAA Administrator Steve Dickson announced he was stepping down from the FAA's top job, he said, to spend more time with his family. Appointed by then-President Trump in 2019, Dickson took the reins from Michael Huerta, who was at the helm of the agency for five years. Dickson's tenure at the FAA was arguably the most challenging in the history of the agency. He inherited the Boeing 737 Max crisis in full swing but successfully shepherded the return of the controversial airliner to commercial service. The original certification process for the 737 Max was rife with irregularities from Boeing, which pushed through certification despite known issues, and the FAA, which did a poor job of overseeing the process.

Airshow performer and former Naval aviator Dale "Snort" Snodgrass died in the crash of a light plane at the Lewiston-Nez Perce County Airport in western Idaho in 2021. Snodgrass was flying an SIAI-Marchetti SM.1019, an Italian liaison plane with a turboprop conversion that was developed based on the design of the Cessna L-19 Bird Dog. An NTSB investigation completed over the summer found that Snodgrass had failed to remove a gust lock before taking off that day, and it detailed the design of the gust lock mechanism, which makes it very difficult for the pilot to see that it is in place.

Who knew that the coronavirus pandemic would be the best thing to happen to airline hiring ever, but it has been. With the pandemic on the decline in 2022, airline travel picked up, to record numbers, in fact, and it quickly became clear that the airline pilot shortage analysts had been predicting for several years was happening, now. The effect was not only a record level of hiring for entry-level pilots but also record enrollment at airline pilot flight schools and universities with professional pilot programs. One unanticipated result was a huge increase in starting pay for new pilots, as majors and regionals alike went head to head for new talent, which translated into increased salaries for seasoned pilots. There was also what was surely a record amount of airline hopping, with pilots jetting from one carrier to another for bluer (or greener) horizons, which made captain upgrade opportunities all the more available. At this point, there's no end in sight, as the public continues to make clear that it has an almost unlimited thirst for air travel.

After years of delaying the release, Paramount finally gave the go-ahead for its high-dollar sequel to the original flick, the new one called "Top Gun: Maverick," with A-lister Tom Cruise reprising his now-titular role of Maverick, the authority-bucking, uber-talented fighter jock. To the surprise of just about everyone---the first movie was super popular but critically panned---the sequel got rave reviews all around, and pilots went nuts for the flying sequences, many of which were filmed in-cockpit. After making nearly a billion and a half dollars in theaters worldwide, it was released to streaming services, where it is expected to rake in the dough for years to come.

It was actually in late 2021 that YouTuber Trevor Jacob caused a stir with a video showing him bailing out of his airplane after, he said, it had developed engine trouble over a remote area in California. Jacob, who was wearing a parachute, was unhurt, though it did take many hours for him to hike to safety. From the start of the saga, however, observers suspected that Jacob had faked the whole thing, and this spring, the FAA weighed in, revoking Jacob's pilot certificate, calling the stunt egregious and reckless.

Speaking of stunts gone wrong, a pair of Red Bull demonstration pilots, cousins Luke Aikins and Andy Farrington, attempted a stunt in which each pilot bailed out of his identically equipped Cessna 182 aircraft with the intent of flying into the vacated cockpit of the other plane. It didn't quite go off as planned. Aikins made it into Farrington's by-then empty 182, but Farrington was forced to deploy his parachute after the plane he was aiming for failed to stabilize in its descent. The plane crashed and was destroyed, but Farrington was fine, as was Aikins, who safely landed the 182 he managed to fly into. The FAA, however, was not amused, and in the succeeding weeks, it came to light that the pilots had not gotten a waiver from the FAA for the flight. Aikins took responsibility, though the FAA yanked both pilots' certificates regardless.

In April, popular backcountry aviator Trent Palmer revealed via a YouTube video that the FAA had suspended his certificate for 60 days after he made what he calls an "inspection pass" of a friend's would-be landing strip in rural northern Nevada, but which the FAA saw as a buzz job. In a YouTube video that Palmer released, he explained the suspension dates back to late 2019, when he made the low pass and ultimately chose not to land at the friend's potential landing site---it is not an airport, Palmer admitted. The low pass was captured on a surveillance cam, and, presumably, a homeowner in the sparsely populated desert area alerted the FAA, which started an investigation. After a meeting with Palmer, that inspector chose to suspend the pilot's Private Pilot certificate for seven months, the administrative charges being, in part, that Palmer flew too close (closer than 500 feet) to people or structures or vehicles while not landing.

It's the stuff of both dreams and nightmares, a scenario where the pilot is incapacitated and a passenger needs to take control, but it happened in real life earlier this year when Darren Harrison, a passenger in a Cessna Caravan, was returning from a fishing trip in the Bahamas. As the plane flew along, Harrison saw that the pilot had become incapacitated, and the plane quickly went into nosedive. Harrison instinctively knew he needed to act quickly or perish. It wasn't a miracle, but it was darn good airplane wrangling by someone with no experience doing any of it. He had to reach over the body of that pilot to wrest the controls from him and then get himself into the seat where the pilot had been and take control of the plane. Harrison did do a great job, but he likely wouldn't have been around to do the talk show circuit had it not been for controllers Chip Flores and Robert Morgan, who knew exactly what to tell Harrison by way of instruction and what  not to tell him. Their coaching and Harrison's natural talent resulted in a safe landing in Palm Beach. The pilot, who suffered a life-threatening cardiac event, has recovered.

Another one of the top stories in 2022 was the destruction of one of Ukraine's national treasures, the giant Antonov An-225, by many metrics the world's largest plane. Built to transport the Soviet Union's Space Shuttle, called Buran, the An-225 was nicknamed Mryia (for Dream). But when Russian forces invaded Ukraine earlier this year, they hit the airport where the plane is housed. Whether or not the giant was intentionally destroyed or not is not known and maybe never will be. And early on, there was hope that the plane somehow escaped with repairable damage, but later photographs show that it was destroyed where it sat in its hangar. Most of the tooling used to originally build the plane 40 years ago still exists, reportedly, but the billion-dollar effort to build another An-225 at this point is also merely a dream.

One of the most compelling aviation-related news stories of the year was only slightly less compelling when it became clear that it wasn't true. The Ghost of Kyiv was the nickname given by Ukrainians to a fighter pilot flying courageously to stave off Russian fighters that were attacking the capital city of Kyiv during the early days of an unprovoked invasion by Russia. Stories abounded of the fighter pilot's exploits, and grainy footage of an aerial dogfight emerged, but none of it was true, at least in the literal sense. Still, the myth of the Ghost of Kyiv provided Ukrainians a much-needed boost in morale in a war their aggressors figured would be quickly over but wound up showcasing Ukraine's fierce spirit of independence. 

A STOL Fatality and Why We Should Never Ask the FAA for More Regulation