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AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause on the NTSB’s website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the […]

GOES Satellite Imagery Very nice article. The only thing I’d add is that, since this article originally appeared, another GOES-R series satellite, GOES-18, was launched. It is now the operational GOES-West satellite and GOES-16 remains the operational GOES-East satellite. Bob W. When I was 8 in 1960, one of our neighbors who worked with this […]

If you’re doing your own routine maintenance—and if you’re not, why not?—you’re going to need a means to open your canister oil filter after every oil change. There are choices on the market, and each design seems to follow a slightly different philosophy, even if the desired result is much the same: Cut the base […]

I’m originally from eastern North Carolina, and have family in Greenville, North Carolina. My office has a business in Pinehurst, North Carolina, and several times a year I will fly to either Greenville or Pinehurst and then swing by the other location on my way back to Virginia. There is a military base, Fort Bragg, […]

You’ve probably heard someone tossing around the term “GOES satellite” at one time or another. This refers to a NOAA satellite program that has been in operation for 47 years. GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, in other words, a weather satellite that’s parked 22,236 miles (35,786 km) above the Earth’s surface, directly above the […]

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 […]

At Least It Didn’t Blow Up On The Pad Overlooked is the fact that this rocket was built out of welded stainless steel, outdoors, in a field in Texas. Compared to the old way of building rockets, doing it this way means that the decrease in cost to orbit with Starship will be massive. The […]

Builders who conducted their own Phase I flight testing who say that the last few hours of that endeavor did not involve sitting there watching the hour meter tick toward 40 are either being dishonest or involved in a project really stretching technological boundaries. For those building a “typical” modern Experimental, where the airframe and […]

My brother‑in‑law told me of an incident at a Class C airport where he parked for a day or so. Upon returning to his aircraft to leave, he did not know exactly what to say to Ground control when he wanted to taxi. After receiving his clearance he listened to the frequency for a little […]

The FAA’s Airplane Flying Handbook (AFH, FAA-H-8083-3C) describes energy management as “the process of planning, monitoring, and controlling altitude and airspeed,” which seems straightforward enough. Using the available tools, primarily pitch and power, we’re expected to attain and maintain “desired vertical flightpath-airspeed profiles, detect, correct and prevent “unintentional altitude-airspeed deviations” and prevent “irreversible deceleration and/or sink rate” […]