Accidents/NTSB

They live and fly by different codes in the 49th state, and what might seem stupid in the lower 48 doesn’t move the needle in a place over twice the size of Texas. Consider the De Havilland Beaver that nosed over in the Noatak River. The NTSB heard about the event—word spreads fast in Alaskan […]

A Cessna CJ2 jet was badly damaged when it ran off a runway at Michigan City Municipal Airport, in Indiana, about 6:45 Wednesday morning. The jet hit a 10-foot-high metal fence, crossed a four-lane highway and slid more than 100 yards across a snowy field before coming to rest, with one wing and its landing […]

A JetBlue Airbus A320 slid off a taxiway shortly after landing on Runway 27 at Boston’s Logan Airport, at about 7:20 p.m. on Monday night, the FAA has reported. No one was hurt, and all the passengers were evacuated via airstairs. The flight had originated in Savannah, Georgia. Passengers who spoke to the media said […]

An unidentified banner pilot starred in what could become an instructional video on how to ditch an airplane when his Piper Pawnee had engine trouble in the Bay of Biscayne near Miami last Friday. The video, shot from a boat full of people who didn’t seem to realize the gravity of the situation until the […]

Five people died in the crash of a Cessna 340 at Bartow Airport in Florida after the aircraft took off in dense fog early Sunday. A prominent Lakeland lawyer, his two daughters and two others were killed in the crash, which occurred near the end of the runway. The lawyer, aged 70, and his passengers, […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine 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 web site at www.ntsb.gov. Final […]

You’d think a flight instructor would limit stupidity. You’d be wrong, as many accidents involved CFIs reacting too slowly to student silliness. Then there’s the Kentucky instructor whose student wouldn’t do anything dumb, so he intervened, setting the Cessna 172’s fuel selector to OFF within, he thought, gliding distance of the runway. Only the instructor […]

When an Amtrak express train on its inaugural run from Seattle to Portland (ironically as competition to the dozens of daily flights between the two cities) piled onto a freeway on Monday it was known within hours that the train lacked critical safety equipment and was going 50 mph faster than the limit for the […]

The operator of a drone that collided with a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter in September didn’t see the aircraft because he was flying the drone beyond visual range, the NTSB said on Thursday. The operator also lacked adequate knowledge of the regulations and safe operating practices for drone flying, the safety board said. The […]

So how much would you have to be paid to intentionally ditch a perfectly serviceable airplane in the open ocean? Enough to buy a used SUV? We didn’t think so but Theodore Robert Wright III apparently thought it was worth the gamble and what makes his reckless behavior even more despicable is that he had […]