Flight Safety

The first airplane some new Air Force pilots will fly might be a Pipistrel Alpha trainer. The first cohort of 20 potential pilots, all of them either about to become USAF officers or freshly commissioned, completed a course that led to 17 them soloing the light sport aircraft. The new program, called the Aviation-Character-Education (ACE) […]

I’d stepped into the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport after finishing up with my last student of the day. I didn’t think anyone was still in the building and I wanted to make sure the coffee maker was off—it has a tendency to create enough smoke to fog the room by morning if left […]

The helicopter industry has seen a surge in fatal accidents during the first six months of 2019, according to the United States Helicopter Safety Team (USHST). The organization says that 15 fatal accidents resulting in 27 fatalities have occurred between January and June, putting the industry on a trajectory for the deadliest year for helicopter […]

Tamarack Aerospace announced that the FAA has approved an alternative method of compliance (AMOC) that will return Cessna CitationJets equipped with the company’s active load alleviation system (ATLAS) winglets to service once “all existing product improvements” have been incorporated. The modifications, which are described in EASA Service Bulletin SB1480, include fixes to improve reliability of […]

Members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation voted 14-12 along party lines in favor of former Delta Air Lines executive Stephen Dickson becoming the next administrator of the FAA on Wednesday. Dickson was nominated for the position last March. As previously reported by AVweb, the nomination process was slowed when allegations […]

Delta Flight 1425 was forced to make an emergency landing after experiencing and engine failure on Monday. In addition to the flight crew, 148 passengers were onboard the MD-88, which was bound for Baltimore-Washington International Airport (BWI). The aircraft was able to land safely at North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport (RDU) at approximately 2:27 p.m. […]

The NTSB has issued its preliminary report on the fatal crash of a Beech 65-A90 conducting a skydiving flight from Dillingham Airfield (HDH) in Mokuleia, Hawaii, on June 21. As previously reported by AVweb, all eleven people onboard—the pilot, three tandem parachute instructors and their three customers, two camera operators and two solo jumpers—were killed […]

“Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it.” (Stop me if you’ve heard that before.) The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We—both this magazine and the industry as a whole—spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, […]

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 accident, […]

A new issue with the Boeing 737 MAX autopilot has emerged in the European Aviation Safety Agency’s bottom-line position on returning the airliner to service. Bloomberg, citing an unnamed source, is reporting EASA listed five major issues that need resolution and four of those have been widely discussed publicly. But the European regulator has also […]