Airplane News: Top Secret Announcement, Max 9 Flies, Mark Baker Steps Down, & Amelia Earhart’s Plane

Welcome to your weekly General Aviation news update, and this week we have 4 stories for you; Pilot Institute Community, Max 9 flies again, Mark Baker steps down from AOPA, and Robotics Firm claims to have found Amelia Earhart’s plane!

First up this week is our release of our exclusive Pilot Institute Community, or PIC for short. https://community.pilotinstitute.com We created the Community as a place for all our students to interact and learn from each other. Here, you will be able to find answers to any aviation questions you have, organized more logically than Facebook. You will get answers from our Subject Matter experts, Guest Instructors, and experienced Pilot Institute graduates. You will also be able to connect with others who are studying at the same time, on the same topic. You can even do chat live with other students directly into the course. The best part is, it’s free and available with your current course login, no need to create a new account. Head over to community.pilotinstitute.com to get started! We’ll also have an exclusive live event today at 4PM, and every day next week for our community kickoff event! Next up is the 737 Max 9, which has been approved to return to service after required inspections. The approval comes nearly three weeks after a door plug was blown out of an Alaska Airlines Max 9 climbing through 16,000 feet. FAA Administrator Whitaker issued a statement saying “The January 5 Boeing 737 MAX incident must never happen again. Let me be clear: This won’t be back to business as usual for Boeing. We will not agree to any request from Boeing for an expansion in production or approve additional production lines for the 737-9 MAX until we are satisfied that the quality control issues uncovered during this process are resolved.” Hopefully this is the last we hear from Boeing with maintenance issues! Next up this week is AOPA’s Mark Baker, who will step down when a suitable replacement has been found. Baker says he will stay for up to two additional years to ensure a smooth transition and that he will continue to run AOPA as normal until the transition occurs. There’s no word on where MZark Baker will go or if he will retire after he is done at AOPA. We’ll keep you updated if we see more. Last up this week, a Robotics Firm out of South Carolina claims to have possibly found Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. The company used side-scan sonar to search a 5200 square mile area in the pacific. The Sonar return was found in the area working off of a 14 year old theory that Earhart’s Navigator, Fred Noonan, may have failed to take into account crossing the international date line in his navigation calculation. This would have put Earhart and Noonan 60 miles west of their intended destination. The company was not able to dive on the return, so the claim is just that for now. We’ll have to see if anyone can get back to that location to dive on the possible wreck. Alright, that’s it! Have a great week and we’ll see you next week. https://community.pilotinstitute.com https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/mark-baker-stepping-down-as-aopa-president/ https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/robotics-firm-confident-amelia-earharts-plane-found/ https://www.avweb.com/aviation-news/alaska-says-max-9-grounding-cost-150-million-expects-boeing-to-pay/