Flight Safety

Ensuring there is fuel aboard the airplane adequate for the planned flight is a basic, primary responsibility for any pilot. Unfortunately, the accident record tells us it’s one responsibility not all pilots fulfill. In our experience, fuel exhaustion, starvation or simple mismanagement accounts for a healthy proportion of engine-failure mishaps. This is true despite the […]

One person has been confirmed dead and nine are missing after a turbine Otter floatplane crashed off Whidbey Island in Washington State on Sunday. The search for survivors was called off at noon on Monday. The charter aircraft took off from Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands for Renton about 2:50 p.m. and the […]

Sherman Smoot, former Naval aviator and longtime warbird and race pilot, died in the crash of a highly modified Yak-11 on Sept. 2. The crash occurred just after takeoff from Minter Field Airport in Shafter, California. Details of the crash have not been confirmed. The aircraft was known as Czech Mate and was set up […]

If you’re like us, you have multiple sources for aeronautical data—charts—that can be in digital or paper format. Also like us, maybe the digital data you use in the cockpit comes from different vendors, even if it’s the same basic information. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time, even the FAA, with the eventual result […]

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 […]

Two Air France pilots have been given a timeout by the airline after they came to blows in the cockpit in June. Details are scant, but the fracas occurred during the short hop from Geneva to Paris. According to ABC, Switzerland’s La Tribune was the first to report that the pilots started arguing shortly after […]

It’s not often another country takes action against a major U.S. airline over maintenance issues, but the African country of Ghana has banned a Delta Boeing 767-300, just one, from its airspace. According to OneMileataTime, the 26-year-old widebody, N195DN, had an unusual spate of maintenance snags, most of them involving the daily service from New […]

The General Accountability Office says the FAA, FBI and FDA need to get together to revive cooperation to stem the increasing scourge of laser attacks on aircraft. The three agencies disbanded their interagency working group five years ago and laser attacks have since spiked dramatically. The FDA is in there because for some reason it […]

“Old pilots tend to be a deaf bunch,” as one AME so bluntly called it. He would know. For me, the tough reality is sinking in that I too may someday join the ranks of the hearing impaired—wrong in expecting that growing old would take longer.  So when reader and hearing-aid candidate Thomas Folk reached […]

The networks were buzzing with cellphone video of the loss of the left engine cowling doors on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-900ER departing Seattle earlier this week. The incident was definitely attention getting as the doors flapped in the slipstream before shredding after touchdown on the abbreviated return to Sea-Tac. There were no injuries, but […]