Flight Safety

Most of us spend our time aloft droning along in straight-and-level flight. For the typical pilot, turns are reserved for the traffic pattern or flying an approach, and occasionally for entering a holding pattern or performing a course reversal. And we rarely exceed 30 degrees of bank. On one hand, that’s okay, since our relative […]

The FAA has chosen five host airports to test technologies designed to “detect and mitigate potential safety risks” presented by unmanned aircraft systems (UAS/drones). The airports selected are New Jersey’s Atlantic City International Airport (ACY); Syracuse Hancock International Airport (SYR) in New York; Rickenbacker International Airport (LCK) in Columbus, Ohio; Huntsville International Airport (HSV) in […]

These pages regularly urge new private pilots to go on to earn their instrument rating. Especially if you ever want to use a personal airplane for regular, reliable transportation, the rating is pretty much mandatory. If you’re content to only fly on good-weather days in search of expensive hamburgers and to abandon the peace-of-mind the […]

A woman who belted a Delta flight attendant in defense of her anti-mask, anti-seatbelt male traveling companion is finding out just how tough the FAA’s new passenger behavior crackdown can be. The FAA announced on Friday it’s proposing a $27,500 civil penalty against the woman, who went after the FA on a plane that should […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has dissected the FAA’s freshly enunciated guidance on cost sharing by passengers in private aircraft and reported to Congress that there are a variety of opinions on that policy. The report, submitted last week, doesn’t reach any conclusions or make any recommendations. In fact, the title of the report (Stakeholders […]

Reuters is reporting that Boeing will spend hundreds of millions of dollars or more to inspect and repair Boeing 787s that are suspected to have manufacturing flaws in the fuselage skins. Boeing stopped delivering Dreamliners in October and didn’t fix the manufacturing process until February, according to the unnamed sources used for the report. It’s […]

Problems with the FAA’s certification and delegation processes impacted its oversight of the Boeing 737 MAX, according to the Office of Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Transportation. In a report released on Tuesday, the OIG noted that the FAA and Boeing followed established processes with regards to certification of the MAX. However, the […]

Every other summer, I torture myself with the $1500 biennial ELT switch flip. I install the required 24-month battery, wait for the minute hand to sweep past the top of the hour and press the test switch with bated breath. The crisp woop-woop of the truly ancient EBC 121.5 MHz beacon makes the Cub legal […]

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced on Monday that it plans to decommission its reconstruction of the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. The reconstruction, which has been used in NTSB accident investigation training courses for almost 20 years, is housed in a 30,000-square-foot hangar at the board’s Ashburn, Virginia, training center. Prior to […]

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 […]