Accidents/NTSB

B737 MAX Crash Paul, From a 14,000 hour ATP rated pilot that has flown all B737 types (except the Max), my guess is that your guess is right. Crews these days rely so much on information that when a glitch happens their minds turn into jello and become passengers themselves. The same effect happened to […]

Following the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last month, the FAA is focusing new scrutiny on the control architecture of the Boeing 737 MAX and may require the company to engineer a fix for an auto trim system installed on the airplane. The system wasn’t well documented and reporting has revealed that pilots and airlines […]

An FAA certification official said on Wednesday that Boeing 737 engine inlets might require design changes in the wake of a Southwest Airlines accident last April in which an uncontained engine failure breached the cabin and caused the death of a passenger. Testifying at an NTSB fact-finding hearing on the accident, another FAA official said […]

If you ride around Seattle, where Boeing lives, you’ll occasionally see a blue-and-white bumper sticker that’s been around for decades, with variations of this wording: Unless it’s a Boeing, I’m not going. Following this week’s revelation that Boeing kept pilots in the dark about an autotrim system on the new 737 MAX, it took the […]

A report released by the U.S. Air Force points to pilot error as the primary cause of an Air National Guard WC-130 Hercules crash that killed all nine servicemembers onboard. The accident occurred on May 2, 2018, shortly after takeoff from Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) in Savannah, Georgia. According to the USAF Accident Investigation […]

Boeing kept airlines and pilots in the dark about an automated background trim system on the 737 MAX that may be implicated in the first crash of the new model in Indonesia last month. The trim system, which is meant to improve pitch characteristics and stall protection, wasn’t even described in any of the documentation […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine, and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s website atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after […]

Although they’re relative rarities these days, as pilots, we all react to airline crashes just as we always have. We’re sober-minded and analytical so we don’t even allow ourselves a conversation inside our heads in speculation about potential causes because we’re waiting for the investigators, right? That’s ridiculous. Of course we speculate, forming snap opinions […]

Many VFR, and inexperienced IFR, pilots mistakenly believe that an instrument rating allows you to launch into “weather.” After all, instrument pilots have been trained to fly on the gages, so making the decision to fly into the clouds shouldn’t be difficult. Veteran IFR pilots understand the complexity of the go/no-go decision. There are weather […]

When Carli McConaughy pulled on the big control column in the middle of the helicopter she was flying in over Honolulu last week, she had no idea what she was doing but she likely saved her own life and those of her fianc and the unconscious pilot beside her. McConaughy, 35, and her newly betrothed […]