Flight Safety

Airlines got mixed messages about the return to service of the Boeing 737 MAX last week. Early in the week, Boeing said it was predicting the plane wouldn’t be ready for passengers until at least June. On Thursday, FAA Administrator Steve Dickson huddled with the CEOs of the U.S. airlines affected by the grounding of […]

A Florida man is facing a laundry list of charges after he allegedly pointed a laser at least four aircraft, including a police helicopter. Charlie Chapman Jr., 41, was apprehended at an industrial site near Bradenton-Sarasota Airport after several complaints from pilots. One of the pilots reported he was temporarily blinded and had lingering blurred […]

Retired NBA star Kobe Bryant and his 13-year-old daughter Gianna were among nine victims of a fatal helicopter crash near Los Angeles on Sunday. Bryant and the others were aboard a Sikorsky S-76 that went down on a wooded hillside in Calabasas about 9:47 a.m. local time. Initial reports said he owned the S-76. It […]

A C-130 Hercules conducting firefighting operations near Cooma, New South Wales, Australia, crashed on Thursday, killing all three people onboard. The victims, all of whom were U.S. residents, have not yet been identified. The aircraft was operated by Coulson Aviation, a subsidiary of Canada-based Coulson Aircrane with branches in the U.S. and Australia. Coulson grounded […]

Until 2004, Flight Service conducted most preflight briefings. Then self‑briefing arrived. By 2017, 96 percent of all pilots self‑briefed and 83 percent of flight plans were filed online. But many of us don’t know how to get a thorough self‑briefing. Between 2010 and 2013, the NTSB could find not weather briefing records in 32 percent […]

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 […]

A consultant working for Chicago Executive Airport told a meeting last week that closing the busy facility’s crosswind runway will improve safety. Craig Louden, a project manager with infrastructure consultant Crawford, Murphy and Tilly Inc., told a room full of pilots at a meeting of the airport’s board of directors last week that closing Runway […]

The legal fallout from a Delta 777’s fuel dump over parts of Los Angeles last week has begun to pile up and the FAA has promised to “thoroughly investigate” the incident. The aircraft took off from LAX for Shanghai just before noon last Tuesday and on the tower tape the crew accepted a “high speed […]

A government advisory committee tasked with investigating FAA aircraft certification procedures and the certification of the grounded 737 MAX 8 has found that the proper process was followed by Boeing and the FAA when certifying the MAX. The Special Committee to Review the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aircraft Certification Process also found the FAA’s certification procedures […]

The FAA has officially opened its new indoor fire research facility in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The agency says the $5 million facility will be used to support research and conduct testing on fluorine-free firefighting foams. The project is being conducted in order to address a directive laid out in the FAA Reauthorization Act of […]