Accidents/NTSB

Standards must be slipping at CNN. Early Saturday morning, they didnt have the United 777 diversion to Midway story. I expected the network to have summoned their stadium full of talking heads to connect that incident to–what else?–Malaysian 370. I figured they could spin a couple of days of 24/7 speculation out of the Midway […]

Two brothers riding in a parasail at Myrtle Beach, S.C., got a different flight than they expected when the banner being towed by an airplane cut through their parachute last weekend. Despite damage, everyone involved landed safely. The older brother, Riley, said he knew something wasnt right when he noticed an airplane flying very close […]

Commercial drones expected to fly U.S. skies in coming years, delivering pizza or monitoring power lines, would be dangerously vulnerable to hackers without a variety of potentially costly countermeasures to their GPS navigation systems, results of a federal study indicate. According to an exclusive report in the Christian Science Monitor, a serious, but not well […]

The National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday denied a petitionfor reconsideration of its findings in the investigation of the July 17, 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. The aircraft exploded while on climbout from JFK, taking the lives of the 230 passengers and crew. The four-year investigation by the NTSB was one of the largest transportation […]

A United Airliners 737 en route from Chicago to Los Angeles landed in Wichita Sunday night after an emergency evacuation slide inadvertently inflated inside the cabin. The aircraft was in cruise flight at FL 380 when the incident occurred, according to Reuters. The aircraft, a 737-700, was carrying 96 passengers plus five crew members. “The […]

President Obama has nominated Christopher Hart to be the next chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. He has been vice chair since October 2013 and has been a member of the NTSB since October 2009, along with other stints from 2009 through 2013 and 1990 through 1993. Hart faces confirmation by the Senate to […]

Letter of the Week:USA Today‘s Strategy Only a personal injury lawyer would write a Lettre de Cachet like the black adventure story published in USA Today. My sympathies for their reduced ad revenues and declining circulation. But holding public executions and sensational smear campaigns has never worked for any publication. Even the networks hesitate to […]

More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a yearlong Washington Post investigation. Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military drones have malfunctioned […]

Three men are reportedto have been killed in the crash of an IAI Westwind II on the northwest side of the Huntsville, Ala., Airport Wednesday afternoon. The airplane appears to have been on a training flight, with flight instructor Robin Gary Smith of Yukon, Okla., and operator of the training company Jet Contrails, reportedly among […]

While reading over USA Todays exhaustive-and exhausting-indictment of general aviation, I was struck by the inescapable feeling that Id been given the Disney tour of every plaintiffs file room for the past 40 years, without benefit of hearing what cross examination revealed in the court cases this reporting obviously leaned so heavily upon. So much […]