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AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine, and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s website atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after […]

Charles Welden grew up in Alabama watching a seaplane come and go off of Lake Martin and thinking it was the coolest thing he’d ever seen. He learned to fly and eventually bought a Cessna 150/150 so he could figure out flying seaplanes himself. In one of those moments that occasionally happens in aviation, he […]

Fixed-wing pilots start learning stall recognition and avoidance during pre-solo training. The private and sport pilot checkrides require recovering from developed stalls with minimal loss of altitude, and stall and spin awareness are (or at least should be) refreshed during flight reviews for the duration of one’s flying career. But unintended stalls still put dozens […]

Many VFR, and inexperienced IFR, pilots mistakenly believe that an instrument rating allows you to launch into “weather.” After all, instrument pilots have been trained to fly on the gages, so making the decision to fly into the clouds shouldn’t be difficult. Veteran IFR pilots understand the complexity of the go/no-go decision. There are weather […]

Thanks to the contents of the FAA’s new airman certification standards (ACS), which are replacing the practical test standards (PTS), most applicants for pilot certificates and ratings must now demonstrate that they can identify, assess and mitigate risk. Although the FAA and industry organizations have developed flight risk assessment tools (FRATs) to help pilots identify […]

As the oft-paraphrased aphorism goes, all is well when the ties that bind us are stronger than the stresses that can separate us. The same goes for parking an aircraft. When we properly secure it after a flight, it’s reasonable to expect it’ll be there when we return. Once we release the ties that bind […]

What on earth (or above it) is the mental state of an airshow pilot? What drives a tiny handful of civilian aviators to spend their every spare moment and dollar in order to earn the badge to fly at “unrestricted” altitudes during a public aerial performance? And does unrestricted mean they can perform as high […]

After almost 25 years of representing Zenith Aircraft Company, Roger Dubbert is one of the most recognized customer service individuals in the kit aircraft business. Like most of the people working for these relatively small producers of homebuilt aircraft designs, Dubbert wears many hats, shifting roles as needed among the flight line, front office, and […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine, and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s website atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after […]

The other evening I headed into the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport as the sun was approaching the horizon. I wanted to sit in one of the, um, experienced, OK, beat up, recliners, look out the windows at the runway and experience the quiet magic as dusk settled in. Once in the room, I […]