Accidents/NTSB

Boeing 737 MAX Seeing the rapidity of Boeing’s claim to have a fix indicates that someone already knew of the potential of the problem but somewhere in the certification process got “voted off the island” when saying it needed to be fixed and tested. This is the classic development story of unclear requirements, time and […]

The FBI has reportedly joined a criminal investigation into the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX in the wake of the crashes of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 and Lion Air Flight 610, according to The Seattle Times. The report comes after Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Elaine Chao issued a memo (PDF) on Tuesday confirming […]

Ethiopian Airlines Thursday disputed a New York Times report that claimed the captain of the 737 MAX that crashed on March 10 with the loss of all aboard hadn’t received simulator training on the aircraft. The airline said all of its pilots had completed differences training from the 737 NG to the newer MAX. However, […]

New reports claim that conversations captured by the Lion Air Flight 610 cockpit voice recorder (CVR) confirm that the pilots were unable to diagnose the control issues encountered in the minutes before the accident that claimed the lives of all 189 people onboard on Oct. 29, 2018. Although a complete transcript of the CVR recording […]

It was a very good afternoon in the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport. OK, the weather was well and truly lousy, and no one was flying. But a lot of pilots had somehow decided that it was the kind of afternoon where the right thing to do was sit in the ratty recliners, drink […]

The grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft has produced one of the most bizarre situations in the history of aviation. And what’s driving it, partly, is that modern airliners aren’t just airplanes, but veritable flying rivers spewing gigabytes of data on everything from cabin temperature to engine vibration, all of it recorded and quite a […]

Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has asked the DOT’s Inspector General to audit the FAA’s approval of the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. This closely follows a detailed investigative piece by the Seattle Times revealing mischaracterizations of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), preliminarily thought to be a component of the two fatal crashes of […]

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, although some take longer. […]

A low setting sun may have been a factor in a runway collision between a T-28 Trojan warbird and a Cessna 172 at Compton Woodley Airport near Los Angeles on Wednesday. A student in the 172 was killed and an instructor seriously injured. The T-28 pilot was unhurt. A video of the incident shows the […]

Ethiopia’s transport minister told reporters on Sunday that preliminary data from Ethiopian Flight 302’s flight data recorder showed “clear similarities” to data pulled from a similar Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed off Indonesia last October. Dagmawit Moges said the FDR, which appeared significantly damaged from the Ethiopian crash, is actually relatively intact. […]