NASA has selected Lockheed Martin to build an X-plane to demonstrate that sonic boom noise can be reduced to a level low enough to lift bans on commercial supersonic flight over US land. NASA believes the low-boom demonstrator—its first clean-sheet manned X-plane in decades—will pave the way for development of quiet supersonic transports by US industry once the overland flight ban has been lifted and replaced by sound-based certification rules. The Low Boom Flight Demonstrator is scheduled to fly in 2021 and will be used to gather community-response data to enable FAA and ICAO to develop sound-based rules for supersonic flight over land. The aircraft is shaped to reduce sonic boom, generating a maximum boom loudness of 75 PLdB flying at Mach 1.4 and 55,000 ft. This compares with 105-110 PLdB for the Concorde. <br/>
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European safety regulators have detailed certification proposals to improve the protection of information from flight recorders. EASA says that premature depowering of cockpit-voice recorders has, in some cases, resulted in loss of useful information which might have been captured if an alternate power source had been installed. EASA adds that some investigations have found both the cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders were fed from the same electrical bus – rendering both recorders inoperative in the event of bus failure. The revision also intends to reduce the possibility that impact sensors designed to stop the recording – might accidentally be activated by other events. EASA is also proposing provisions to accommodate installation of combination recorders as well as deployable recorders. <br/>
Pan-European air navigation authority Eurocontrol expects normal network management operations to resume late April 3, after a failure of the crucial Enhanced Tactical Flow Management System. The ETFMS balances traffic demand over the European network against available capacity of air traffic control sectors. It achieves this by using flight plan information, filed through a flight plan processing system by aircraft operators, to calculate demand. The ETFMS has a slot-allocation function to ensure that the capacity is available to meet the demand. But a failure in this system meant that flight plans filed before 10:26UTC April 3 were lost, forcing aircraft operators to refile all flight plans for aircraft that had not already departed. <br/>