GoKawiil
Tech News
NASA announced it will exercise options for two additional crewed Starliner missions and provide Boeing $359 million to rebuild overheating reaction control thrusters and certify ULA's Vulcan rocket for astronaut flights. The funding comes on top of $5.1 billion already paid under the fixed-price Commercial Crew contract, after Starliner's 2024 crewed test flight nearly ended in disaster due to thruster failures.
Southwest Airlines and United Airlines have told Boeing they don't want the latest 737 MAX software installed on incoming jets, after Boeing found a flaw in an automated navigation feature that can misfire when crews abandon a landing and reroute. Neither airline currently has planes flying with the affected software. Boeing notified operators in late August, has launched a formal safety review shared with the FAA, and says it's developing a permanent fix, with an update originally planned for early 2028 that it is now trying to accelerate.
Ahead of a Washington summit between Trump and Xi, analysts say the trade truce reached in May is being fulfilled unevenly across its three main commitments: China's soybean purchases, its pledge to buy 200 Boeing jets, and the resumption of rare earth magnet exports after a 12-month suspension of export controls. Delivery on some commitments remains difficult to verify, according to analysts tracking the deal.
NASA has expanded its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract with SpaceX, adding three additional crewed Dragon missions to the International Space Station through 2030. The new award is worth up to $946 million and brings SpaceX's total operational flights under the contract to 17, pushing its cumulative earnings from NASA to $5.92 billion. SpaceX shares ISS crew transport duties with Boeing, whose Starliner is set to begin crewed flights in 2027 after an unpiloted test flight.
NASA plans to announce as soon as next week that it will order two additional crewed missions from Boeing's Starliner, help fund fixes to its thruster problems, and support certifying the capsule for launch on a new rocket. The move comes after SpaceX told NASA officials it intends to retire Crew Dragon by 2030 or sooner as it shifts focus toward Starship and Starlink-related business.
An open-source project called Scikit-decide, combined with TU Delft's OpenAP fuel consumption model and NOAA wind data, can calculate more fuel-efficient flight paths for airliners. The author tested it against a commercial fuel-cost example of a Boeing 787-9 flying nonstop from Newark to Rome, showing how wind-adjusted routing could trim thousands of dollars in fuel spend. The comparison also included an Airbus A320 test using OpenAP's performance model on the author's own high-end workstation.
The NTSB detailed early findings from the cockpit voice and flight data recorders recovered after 21 Air Flight 7598, a Boeing 767-33A cargo plane, overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sept. 6. The recorders captured over two hours of audio and 54 hours of flight data, with a timeline showing the crew configuring flaps and gear for landing while one pilot repeatedly warned about excessive approach speed.
An Amazon Prime Air Boeing 767-300 overran the runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday, tearing through a chain-link fence and striking a ground crew and an SUV before stopping just feet from a lot of parked Tesla Cybercabs. Five people were killed in the crash. Elon Musk's only public response so far has been a one-word tweet, 'Weird.'
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said the 21 Air Boeing 767-300 operating Prime Air Flight 7598 overshot Miami International Airport's runway by roughly 1,300 feet after arriving from San Juan on Sunday. The jet struck a cleaning-company van inside the airport, broke through a perimeter fence and hit a passenger car outside, killing at least five people and injuring five more before sliding through a second fence near parked Tesla robotaxis.
A Boeing 767-300 operated by 21 Air on behalf of Amazon Air overran the runway while landing at Miami International Airport around 2 p.m. Sunday, catching fire and striking vehicles on a road beyond the airport grounds. The flight had originated from Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport in Puerto Rico, and the incident caused multiple injuries and forced a temporary halt to airport operations while more than 60 Miami-Dade Fire Rescue units responded.