Flight Safety

There’s an amusing quip from award-winning author Robert McCloskey that says, “I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.” This double speak serves to illustrate the importance of clear communication. There are few places in human […]

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 […]

Indian authorities have suspended the license of a SpiceJet Boeing 737 captain after turbulence injured 15 passengers and crew and damaged parts of the interior on a May 1 flight. According to SimpleFlying, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DCGA) says the pilot elected to fly through an area of bad weather that other crews […]

The global accident rate for scheduled commercial flights dropped to 1.93 per one million departures in 2021, according to the recently released International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) 2022 Safety Report. The number represents a 9.8 percent decrease compared to the previous year, which saw 2.14 accidents per one million departures. The report (PDF), which covers […]

I recall a chilly morning at the Reno-Stead airport when I realized I no longer felt like a total outsider. It was 2017, the first year I towed Jeff LaVelle’s trailer full of tools, hardware and a spare Hartzell propeller to the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada. He raced his Glasair III and I stood alongside him […]

Just as with any other complex endeavor that’s developed over time, aviation has many myths. That’s especially true when it comes to FAA regulations—the FARs. To be fair, there are a lot of regulations, and many of them are written for attorneys, not pilots. Especially for newer pilots or those who fly different aircraft in […]

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 […]

The NTSB has determined the pilot of a Citation involved in a high-profile crash in Oregon in early 2021 became incapacitated at the controls but it can’t say why. It listed the probable cause as “a loss of airplane control due to pilot incapacitation for reasons that could not be determined.“ The 72-year-old pilot was […]

In what may be the shortest final report ever issued by the NTSB, the board found the probable cause of the crash of a Cessna 182 being used in a made-for-streaming airplane swap stunt for Red Bull last April to be “exceedance of the critical angle of attack which resulted in a stall, subsequent inverted […]

Every single emergency procedure you can imagine should follow the basic outline of “aviate, navigate, communicate” on the pilot’s side of things, but what does ATC do? It’s actually kind of backwards. We communicate with you first to find out what you might need, then we navigate other conflicting airplanes out of your way so […]