The Federal Aviation Administration is the US government agency that regulates civil aviation and commercial spaceflight, including safety and airspace.
FAA says it will prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement on SpaceX's request to fly Starship 456 times a year from Starbase, up from 25. The review is at an early stage, and public scoping meetings run Nov. 17 to 19.
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Six House Democrats asked the FAA on October 13 to pause SMART, its AI air traffic tool, 22 days after it went live at three Washington-area airports. The letter cannot block adoption, and the only case for slower rollout or higher vendor costs is Cryptopolitan's conditional one.
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Zipline started drone food delivery in Round Rock, north of Austin, on October 9, its first service zone in the Austin area. The suburb tests whether a network first built for medical supplies can win repeat food orders at addresses with room for a tethered drop.
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Zipline flew a demonstration delivery at a Round Rock high school on October 8, a day before customer service was due to start in the Austin suburb. The launch tests whether its Texas network can grow city by city, on order figures that so far come only from Zipline.
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Air Space Intelligence won a five-year U.S. Army command-and-control contract with a $99 million ceiling, a SAM.gov notice shows. The figure only caps orders, so the Army's task orders will decide what software first built for airline dispatchers earns.
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Amazon cut drone flights in College Station, its longtime test market, even after the FAA dismissed residents' complaints. A Fast Company analysis argues local pressure on routes may now matter more than federal rules, since McKinsey's cost figures leave drones little room for detours.
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Boeing won the Navy's $20 billion F/A-XX contract and now holds both US sixth-generation fighter programs. Investors have to judge whether a company still repairing its jetliner and space programs can build two new fighters on cost and on schedule.
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FAA safety experts ruled a 737 Max software glitch poses no safety concern, clearing a late obstacle to Boeing's Max 10 and its nearly 1,500 orders. Officials told Reuters approval could come as soon as later this month, with crews following an interim procedure until Boeing finishes a software fix.
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DoorDash built its drone service around the 80% of restaurant orders it says fit the aircraft, designing the kitchen handoff before the drone. The order data and dispatch software behind it now have to work inside an FAA certificate that keeps every flight within line of sight.
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Private jets make up about 7% of FAA-handled flights but pay 0.6% of the taxes into the fund that helps finance it, Transportation Department data show. The one repeal effort Fortune reports targets a Massachusetts sales-tax exemption, and that bill is still in committee.
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SpaceX's Starship Flight 14 will try to reach orbit for the first time carrying 26 Starlink V3 satellites that together add about 26 Tbps of capacity. For a company valued near $2 trillion, it tests how much one launch can lift, while the cost of each launch still depends on reuse.
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More than 40 million people in the US Northeast are bracing for an unusually strong nor'easter, with gusts over 60 mph and up to 13 cm of rain forecast. Airlines and event organisers have already changed plans. Warnings about damaged power lines mean operators should plan for outages this weekend.
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Prime Air will add five states and six times the coverage by year-end. Its own delivery target, its accident file and a December permit decision in England are the harder numbers.
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Prime Air's sixfold expansion is a real escalation of the last-mile fight with Walmart. It is also still a rounding error on Amazon's parcel volume, and the economics remain unproven.
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The San Francisco startup wants drone fleets to thin clouds over solar farms. The uplift range comes from its own model, the first large flight is targeted for 2027, and standard FAA rules forbid the profile.
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A White House memo asks federal agencies to clear the way to 1,000 US launches and re-entries a year by 2030, from 178. The scarce input is range frequency and airspace, not hardware.
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A converted Cessna Caravan taxied, took off, navigated and landed on its own across the country, ending near North Carolina's Outer Banks. The pilot in the seat was there for compliance and never operated the controls.
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Field tests at NASA Ames put the taxi clearance into data the aircraft can follow by itself, with a sensor suite watching for vehicles in its path. NASA says the workload fell for pilots and controllers alike.
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The Xwing-derived system flew a converted Cessna Caravan across the United States without pilot input, and Joby means to sell it as a kit on conventional airframes while its electric air taxi waits on FAA certification.
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The airlines spent weeks asking the FAA to narrow SMART, and the version debuting this month hands controllers route advice at the three Washington-area airports under a 90-day test. The agency's own officials describe it as both record speed and a slow roll.
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Product · August 17, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers