Accidents/NTSB

When I was a student pilot, I was lucky to have some grizzled mentors. There were a lot of “do this” and “don’t do that” admonitions, a lot of tips regarding shortcuts and rules of thumb, plus some sage advice about decision-making. A lot of that advice could be broken down into the old “It’s […]

A United A319 crew had their hands full on Saturday after the brakes on the left main gear apparently locked up either as they were taking off from La Guardia or shortly after. According to the Aviation Herals, they diverted immediately to Newark instead of taking the 128 passengers and three cabin crew to Houston. […]

Local officials in Addison, Texas, have confirmed that all 10 people aboard died in the crash of a King Air 350 Sunday morning. The aircraft was taking off from the airport near Dallas when it struck a hangar and caught fire. There were no people in the hangar but at least one business jet could […]

Robert Crandall, the long-time CEO of American Airlines, once said the industry is always in the grip of its dumbest competitor. A corollary for GA—if there is one—is that the perception of safety is always set by the latest horrific accident. And it occurred in Hawaii last Friday when a King Air carrying 10 skydivers […]

The FAA has recently discovered another potential risk on the grounded 737 MAX that it is requiring Boeing to mitigate before the aircraft can be returned to service, according to a statement by the agency on Wednesday. The problem reportedly involves the speed at which a computer chip is processing data, causing electric trim switches […]

NASA and the FAA dropped a 33,000-pound Fokker F28 regional jet from more than 150 feet in the air as part of a crashworthiness test last week. Along for the ride were 24 crash dummies, designed to mimic a range of individuals from a 3-year-old child to a 273-pound adult. In addition to helping the […]

Both pilot and passenger suffered minor injuries after their Icon A5 flipped on landing at Okanagan Lake, West Kelowna, British Columbia. Police reports and post-crash video suggest that the Icon’s gear was extended for the water landing, likely to be the cause of the flip-over. According to local reports, Caeli Turner with British Columbia Emergency […]

Dillingham Airport on Oahu’s north shore remains closed following the crash of a King Air 65-A90 that killed 11 people on Friday. NTSB investigators have arrived and have begun investigating the wreck site, the agency said Monday. “This is the deadliest accident involving a civil airplane in the United States since 2011. We’re here to […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safety magazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause on the NTSB’s website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the accident, […]

When the last human pilot exits the cockpit and the cockpit no longer even has a door for a human, we’ll still be arguing about the benefits of aircraft automation. For the time being, this much is true: There is general agreement that widespread automation is eroding pilot physical skills, if not judgment acuity along […]