The Flight Nerd Weekly Briefing

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

01. Cockpit Voice Recorder

Tomorrow morning, the fastest motorsport on Earth roars back to life over the New Mexico desert as the National Championship Air Races open their second season in Roswell, and if you're anywhere within a few hundred miles, your sectional just got a lot more interesting. Yesterday, in a much quieter but arguably more consequential move, the FAA rewired the sport pilot practical test standards to catch up with July's MOSAIC overhaul, which means checkride altitudes just changed for a whole category of pilots. Throw in $481 million landing at 154 airports across the country this month, and you've got a week where the acronyms (FAA, PTS, TFR, AIG) are all doing real work on real runways. This is the kind of week that separates the pilots who read the NOTAMs from the pilots who find out the hard way.