Accidents/NTSB

For the last few years, my home airport has been a private, paved and lighted strip in a rural area. The pilot-controlled lighting is non-standard, however. For one, the system’s intensity is relatively weak. For another, there seem to be fewer runway lights than at most other airports I’ve used. And the light fixtures themselves […]

Authorities have found the body of a skydiving instructor who went missing during a tandem jump on Thursday near Skydive New England in Lebanon, Maine. As is standard for a tandem jump, only the instructor, who has been identified as Brett Bickford, 41, of Rochester, New Hampshire, was equipped with a parachute and the unidentified […]

A Falcon 50 jet slid off of the runway after landing at Greenville Downtown Airport (GMU) in Greenville County, South Carolina, killing the pilot and copilot. The two passengers onboard were injured in the accident and remain hospitalized. Airport director Joe Frasher said in a media briefing that he saw the aircraft land and that […]

The NTSB held a probable-cause hearing on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., to discuss their findings and issue conclusions and recommendations regarding the close call at San Francisco International Airport in July 2017, when an Air Canada A320 lined up on a crowded taxiway instead of the designated runway. The board found the flight crew misidentified […]

Once upon a time in a world thought to be a fantasyland, but that actually existed, if you did something stupid in an airplane that didn’t kill you, this would happen: An avuncular man with pattern baldness wearing a short-sleeve white shirt, a narrow black tie and a blue FAA nametag, would put his arm […]

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 […]

Scattered among accident reports is the occasional hand prop attempt that goes wrong but not many concern high-performance aircraft. The accompanying video illustrates that it is indeed possible to spark up a Cirrus SR22’s IO-550 from the front but it needs to be done with an abundance of forethought and caution. It’s not clear who […]

A recent video about the famed Cornfield Bomber brought back some fond memories of that airplane for me. As a freshly minted Air Force pilot, I was lucky enough to get assigned to the 49th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, New York, then its home. Tail number 58-0787 is sometimes […]

How Not To Botch The FAA Medical John Yodice wrote a column once on the legal perils of making a falsification on the medical application, even unintentional ones (such as accidentally forgetting a hospital stay). It results in a felony and can become years of jail time as well as a heavy fine (like $25k). […]

In partnership with the Transportation Safety Institute (TSI), the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) hosted a three-day Experimental Accident Investigation course this week. According to EAA, attendees were primarily “FAA field office staff who work with the certification of experimental and light-sport aircraft and investigate accidents.” The course, which is held at EAA’s headquarters in Oshkosh, […]