Flight Safety

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 FAA has announced it will investigate last week’s spectacular crash landing of SpaceX’s SN9 Starship prototype in Texas. The silo-like rocket performed flawlessly through launch to 50,000 feet, where it hovered briefly before doing its “belly flop” maneuver to descend. One of the engines needed to brake the rocket in its final descent didn’t […]

The pilot killed in the crash of a Cessna 560 in Oregon in early January had just flunked the type rating course and was likely on his first solo flight in the aircraft, according to the NTSB’s preliminary report. The aircraft spiraled from 31,000 feet to a mountainous area on the Warm Springs Reservation on […]

As President Joe Biden enjoys a weekend at home in Wilmington, Delaware, general aviation is continuing to operate, even within the high-security 12-NM ring of the 30-NM TFR that follows him when he travels. AOPA is reporting that the TFR in place until Monday is a big improvement over the draft version rolled out in […]

The NTSB’s materials lab is now poring over the rudder of a Piper Super Cruiser that bent almost horizontally in flight in Alaska last June. The board recently issued a preliminary report on the incident, which created some challenges for the two pilots on board but worked out safely in the end. A private pilot […]

I learned a lot about flying airplanes while working 60 feet underground. I served as a missile launch control officer in the U.S. Air Force in the waning days of the Cold War. We worked in two-person crews, a commander and a deputy, behind a sealed blast door in a small room filled with old-school […]

Poor weather has always topped my list of potential aviation hazards. But after earning the instrument rating, I was much more willing to go out and tackle low ceilings and visibility, which inevitably led to poking around thunderstorms and frontal activity. I quickly learned there were no iron-clad rules or procedures for safely penetrating them […]

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has gone to war with the FAA after the agency denied the company permission to launch its SN9 prototype deep space rocket as scheduled on Jan. 28. The agency issued a last-minute notice about five hours before the scheduled launch and said it was rescheduled until the following day. The delay […]

The Aviation Safety Reporting System has been inundated with hundreds of reports from pilots, flight attendants and support personnel on flight safety issues directly related to COVID-19. NASA runs the program as a consequence-free method for aviation personnel to describe safety miscues that didn’t result in incidents. Acting on a request, NASA culled out all […]

Pilots using Wilmington Airport in North Carolina are hoping the mysterious and random interruptions in GPS service near the airport are a thing of the past after an FAA team tracked down the likely cause. The agency officials discovered signals coming from a utility company’s wireless control system were jamming GPS within a two-mile radius […]