Accidents/NTSB

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. […]

The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation (MCAS) system at the center of investigations into two fatal crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 was misunderstood and mischaracterized in a flawed certification process as Boeing and the FAA rushed to bring the new jet to market, a Seattle Times investigation published Sunday alleges. Citing named and unnamed sources, […]

Flight 1549 Capt. Chesley Sullenberger has weighed in on the MAX 8 discussion but from a crew training and experience perspective. The pilot who deadsticked an A320 into the Hudson River after a dual engine failure 10 years ago with the help of First Officer Jeff Skiles said in a Facebook post on Saturday that […]

Boeing 737 MAX Grounding I strongly suspect that many (if not a majority) of airlines do not include enough aircraft handling simulator training on their conversion courses, especially on difference courses. For example, converting from the B737-800 to the 737 MAX should include simulator training specifically aimed at how to deal with a malfunctioning MCAS, […]

Investigators probing the wreck of Ethiopian Airlines Fight 302 have reportedly recovered the airplane’s trim jackscrew and found it set to a nose-down position. This is similar to the jackscrew position found in the Lion Air crash last October and may be the additional evidence that convinced the FAA to ground the Boeing 737 MAX […]

The FAA has uncovered new information from the wreckage of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 “concerning the aircraft’s configuration just after takeoff that, taken together with newly refined data from satellite-based tracking of the aircraft’s flight path, indicates some similarities between the ET302 and [Lion Air] JT610 accidents,” according to the emergency order issued by the […]

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has determined that the fatal crash of a Learjet 35A near New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport (TEB) on May 15, 2017, was caused by the pilot’s “attempt to salvage an unstabilized visual approach.” According to the NTSB, the aircraft stalled while conducting a circle-to-land maneuver and crashed into a commercial […]

From the moment the Commerce Department got its governmental mitts on pilot licensing in 1926, politics and aviation have been inextricably entwined. But rarely is that on such naked display as it was Wednesday when the FAA announced that it was joining much of the rest of the world in grounding Boeing’s 737 MAX after […]