Accidents/NTSB

“Notams are a bunch of garbage,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said last week, at the board’s probable-cause meeting about last year’s close call in San Francisco. “The Notam system is really messed up,” he continued. “There are 10 pages of Notams [for the Air Canada flight] … and [the runway closure] is on page 8 […]

Around 20 years ago, a cold snap in the mid-southeast U.S. brought temperatures to well below freezing. The following day, my employee and I headed to the airport in midafternoon. We planned to fly our borrowed twin Commander to Milwaukee, returning it to its owner. We walked directly to the airplane, which had not been […]

The FAA on Monday issued a new Airworthiness Directive that affects about 1,800 Boeing 737 aircraft operated in the U.S. The AD requires additional inspections of the fan blades in all the airplanes equipped with the same type of blades that caused a catastrophic engine failure in April, when one passenger died on a Southwest […]

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 […]