Accidents/NTSB

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 […]

Ho-hum, another month, another accident in which the aviation industry can get its pants snagged on the notion that cockpit automation is turning us all into numbskull idiots with hands of stone. But what if the pilot is already well on his way to being a numbskull? Does the automation push him over the edge […]

How can one not see the grim humor in last week’s confluence of events that seemed tailor made to tank Third Class medical reform? Hapless doesn’t even begin to describe general aviation’s fate before the fortunes of a callous world.The first turn of bad timing was obviously the untimely death of an American Airlines captain […]

If you’re a YouTube aviation video junkie, you’ve probably seen this one of what’s called a blade-out test. It’s intended to prove that the containment around a high-bypass turbofan engine can prevent shrapnel from ricocheting outside the engine in the event that the fan loses one or more blades. Or the engine core comes asunder. […]

I get a certain perverse pleasure out of fishing for stupidity and not to make light of my fellow aviators’ misfortunes, the Grand Banks of stupidity is found in the NTSB accident database. Here, you will find a vast and ever varied trove of trained, government-certified airmen enlisting the aid of perfectly serviceable airplanes to […]

The FAA has some serious explaining to do following a tragic accident in Long Island last weekend that killed one person and injured another. As we reported, a Bonanza pilot had engine trouble and the controller vectored him toward a runway at the former Grumman Bethpage airport. Unfortunately, that airport has been closed for some […]