Accident Probe

One of the truisms in aviation is that there’s weather no airplane should tackle. The addendum is that if you want to go shoot approaches in your Cessna 150 through relatively benign IMC, there’s probably not that much that can go wrong. But even a 747 likely won’t tolerate extreme icing. And we all (should) […]

Outside of large training organizations or fleet operations, there is little standardization of equipment, systems or procedures within general aviation. Toss in a few years among different owners and identical airplanes that rolled off an assembly line together 10 or 20 years earlier will vary wildly in their equipment, maintenance history and wear and tear. […]

As new aircraft and avionics become more sophisticated and capable, a pilot’s learning curve becomes more complicated. Understanding how and why things work the way they do is a critical part of our training and study. Brian Sagi’s article for Aviation Safety, “Automation Misbehavior,” explores some of the ramifications and remedial actions pilots should know […]

Owning an aircraft is an empowering experience. Winged assets in your hip pocket can open up all kinds of opportunities and adventures free of many concerns associated with traditional clubs and aircraft rental operations. It’s also an awesome responsibility, often isn’t kind to your wallet and can bring many new and unanticipated challenges. For one […]

It’s an article of faith in aviation and other endeavors that having more experience with a specific machine is less risky than having less. In aviation, we measure this by the number of hours accrued in a specific aircraft type. A corollary is that pilots with relatively few hours in-type are at greater risk of […]

When one pores over the number of accident reports I have over the years, a few things stand out. One is there are a lot of engine failures resulting in the NTSB’s definition of an accident. Another is that post-accident investigation frequently fails to identify a reason for the failure; the engine runs fine when […]

Airframe icing can be found year-round, depending on geography and altitude. In North America, it’s the season when pilots of personal airplanes, which generally don’t fly high enough to worry about ice most of the year, need to factor it into their planning and execution. Even if you’re flying something with a form of ice […]

Even before I started taking flying lessons, I was exposed to aviation. Without a formal frame of reference, I absorbed what little I could from other pilots’ stories, reading about flying in books and magazines like this one and, tragically, learning how some of them came to grief. That usually involved poor weather. It took […]

That aviation is a highly regulated activity should come as no surprise to readers. Many other applicable rules are unwritten, developed by pilots after a mishap or mistake, which not necessarily resulted in an accident or incident. How we tackle becoming comfortable with new avionics aboard a familiar airplane is a question FAA regulations don’t […]

Editor’s note: For our July 2021 Accident Probe, Oshkosh Or Bust, we explored an accident involving a non-instrument-rated pilot who took off into dark night IMC and crashed into an open field near the airport, killing himself and his passenger. This month’s accident is eerily similar, except both occupants were instrument-rated commercial pilots. The underlying […]