Accidents/NTSB

As expected, Robert Sumwalt has been confirmed as the 14th chair of the National Transportation Safety Board and he brings a wealth of aviation experience to the job. Sumwalt was a pilot for Piedmont Airlines and US Airways for 24 years and his appointment is being met with enthusiasm from aviation groups. “Robert is committed […]

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 […]

One person was killed and two injured, when a Lake Renegade crashed on takeoff from the AirVenture Seaplane Base on Thursday. The victims, all believed to be from Minnesota, were trying to fly home when the amphibious flying boat flipped as it was taking off from a choppy Lake Winnebago. The aircraft remained partially submerged […]

The NTSB’s final report on the fatal crash of an Icon A5 in a northern California lake in May is expected in the next few weeks and the speedy investigation was aided by information provided by the aircraft’s onboard flight data recorder. Icon CEO Kirk Hawkins said in an interview at AirVenture 2017 the cause […]

April 1, 2017, Edgewater, Fla. Cessna 170B/Grumman AA-5B Tiger At about 0842 Eastern time, the two airplanes were destroyed in an in-flight collision. The airline transport pilot flying the Cessna and the airline transport pilot flying the Grumman were both fatally injured. Visual conditions prevailed. The airplanes were part of a five-ship formation flight. Shortly […]

Authorities in Sonoma, California, are investigating whether the deployment of a Cirrus whole-plane parachute at low level was a factor in the death of the pilot. Pilot Bill Goldman was killed and his son, daughter and their nanny were seriously hurt in the crash. The SR22T took off from Sonoma Skypark on Friday morning and […]

Bell Helicopter’s twin-engine 525 Relentless is back in the air after being grounded for about a year following a fatal crash in Texas, the company has announced. Two Bell Helicopter pilots were killed in July 2016 when the 525 crashed during a test flight near the company’s facility in eastern Texas. “Bell Helicopter has worked […]

Ever had a gear-up landing? I’ll tell you about mine in a moment, but first, when I was assembling today’s video it occurred to me that retractable landing gear systems are quite the test of human factors engineering. And the modern trend toward high-performance aircraft with fixed gear—Cirrus mainly—is basically genius at work. I swept […]

Six people died when a Cessna 421 broke up in the air over northern Wisconsin about 3 a.m. on Saturday, the NTSB has said. The airplane had departed from Waukegan, Illinois, with six men on board who were headed to Manitoba, Canada, for a fishing trip. NTSB investigators told The Associated Press there was a […]

Today’s blog was going to be a PSA to set straight the horrible thrashing general aviation took at the hands of yet another misguided network news feature. But, damn it, foiled again. The piece in question ran Sunday night on NBC’s Dateline and chronicled the story of McKenzie Morgan, a plucky 17-year-old student pilot who […]