Latest from Bill Wagstaff

For those toiling for oil on the roiling North Sea, the stormy nature of that piece of water keeps the possibility of rescue constantly in mind.

Bell Helicopter Textron last month announced plans to lay off 270 workers at its Fort Worth-area plants.

A Boeing Vertol BV-107 operated by Columbia Helicopters of Portland, Ore., crashed in August during a maintenance check flight in southern Montana, killing

An era has ended in the helicopter offshore oil-support business with Carroll Suggs, wife of Petroleum Helicopters Inc.

In a world in which one can, by means of a relatively inexpensive handheld GPS, determine one’s position within two feet, there just aren’t a lot of explor

More than a decade-and-a-half after PZL-Swidnik introduced it to the Western world in 1985, the Polish helicopter manufacturer’s Ecureuil-like SW-4 turbine

A helicopter owned and operated by U.S.

French baking baron Lionel Poilane was killed November 7 when the Agusta 109C he was piloting crashed into the sea off Brittany, France’s northwestern coas

Ellsworth “Dutch” Kuhlman, the hospital executive who in 1972 founded the Flight for Life medical airlift program at Denver’s St.

Once again, an emergency AD (No.

The U.S.

A pair of Bell Boeing MV-22 tiltrotor transports have joined the remedial developmental flight-test program that’s hoped to get the cause of tiltrotor oper

Last month’s annual meeting of the Association of Air Medical Services was its usual low-key success as some 2,500 aeromedical professionals, a record numb

Most aviators feel pretty secure when ensconced in that expensive, fleece-covered, form-fitted cockpit seat, their bodies held firmly in place by a five-po

The men and women who race cars on the Nascar circuit are addicts.

More than a year later, southern Manhattan still seems scarred, incomplete; the variegated skyline stretching the length of the island seems an archite

Helicopters have traditionally gotten short shrift in the movies.

The successful helicopter airline is the rotorcraft world’s equivalent of the lost continent of Atlantis.

Finalizing an acquisition process long under way, leading aeromedical transport operator Air Methods of Denver acquired Rocky Mountain Holdings (RMH) of Pr

CHC Helicopter Corp.

For the last 15 years, a northern New Jersey bank has been quietly landing its AS 350 AStar on a grassy patch of ground a few yards from its Ramsey o

The FAA has released a list of stadiums to help pilots comply with notam 2/0199.

American Eurocopter has sold its first EC 145 in the U.S., to the Lee County (Florida) division of public safety/EMS.

Most medevac helicopter missions are a race against time, and when the helicopter loses, it’s usually a time for sadness.

Nobody beats the Russians when it comes to rotorcraft “bigness.” Mil unveiled the Mi-12 in 1971 and later hoisted a record-setting 44 tons to more than 7,0

Helicopter pilots who conduct commercial passenger-carrying flights in areas where whiteout conditions routinely occur should be required to have a helicop

“Why doesn’t the U.S.

On a blustery day on a deserted beach near Nags Head on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, two brothers began humanity’s controlled adventure away from the surf

As all lawyers know, the letter and the spirit of regulations are two very different things.

A growing number of aviation medical professionals are questioning pilots’ reliance on their required annual (or, in the case of first-class medicals, six-