Accidents/NTSB

NTSB investigators have completed their fact-finding into the October 2014 midair crash at the Frederick, Maryland, airport, in which three people in a Robinson R44 helicopter died after a Cirrus SR22 “flew through [its] rotor system” in the traffic pattern. The safety board has not yet determined the accident’s probable cause. The factual report states […]

Just in time for Sun ‘n Fun, the NTSB has issued a new Safety Alert aimed at pilots planning to fly in to an aviation event. “Arrivals at major fly-in events … pose unique challenges for pilots (and air traffic controllers),” the NTSB says, “including extremely high-density traffic, special flight and communication procedures, a rapidly […]

As the inevitable autonomy of everything looms just ahead, rock-star entrepreneur Elon Musk had this to say at a recent development conference: “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine. It’s too dangerous.” And that’s to say the driverless car visionaries don’t just want to offer you an autonomous vehicle, they’ll insist on […]

With more than 6300 CAPS-equipped Cirrus aircraft out there and given all the unblinking security cameras running 24/7, it was inevitable that good video of a Cirrus parachute touchdown would eventually emerge. Earlier this month,it did. (More here.) On March 5, an SR22 en route from Groton, Connecticut, to Republic Airport on Long Island suffered […]

We can argue about a lot in aviation, but one thing we rarely dispute is the unwritten rule that your AME and your doctor shouldn’t be the same person. Unpack the logic of that and two things become implicit: We don’t trust the government with our medical data (rightfully) and, if we’re honest, we want […]

A fatal crash in Alaska in November 2013 was initiated by one small mistake by the pilot — a missed frequency change, which meant the lights failed to come on as expected at the destination airport — but in the NTSB’s final report, issued on Friday, the safety board said a chain of events and […]

A critically injured teen who survived the crash of a touring helicopter in Hawaii last week has died. The Bell 206B, which plunged into the water near Pearl Harbor memorials on Feb. 18 with five aboard, was in an emergency descent, the NTSB reported Thursday. The 16-year-old Canadian boy was taken to a local hospital […]

The FAA today issued a safety alert to airlines around the world, urging them to conduct a “safety risk assessment” regarding the transport of lithium batteries as cargo, in light of new evidence from the agency’s recent lithium-battery-fire tests. The FAA also advised its inspectors to determine whether airlines have adequately assessed the risk of […]

The former president of Sikorsky Aircraft was killed along with his passenger when his P-51D crashednear Maricopa, Arizona, on Friday. Jeffrey Pino, 61, was head of Sikorsky from 2006 to 2012. He was flying the Mustang, named Big Beautiful Doll, when it went down. The passenger was identified as Nickolas Tramontano, 71, of Brookfield, Connecticut. […]

Investigators in Egypt say they’ve found no evidence that a terrorist bomb brought down a Russian airliner that crashed in the Sinai desert on Oct. 31. That’s the opposite of what Russian investigators claim and what U.S. security experts suspect, according to a CNN report on Monday. Egyptian officials have steadfastly resisted Russian claims that […]