Flight Safety

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 […]

The International Civil Aviation Organization will hold meetings in Montreal next week to review pilot licensing requirements. ICAO officials said the meeting was organized to review whether current training standards are relevant for pilots of modern highly automated airliners. “Recently, with current events, people are discussing whether the minimum requirements or experience are still valid, […]

The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a “special condition” for the certification of eVTOL aircraft up to a maximum takeoff weight of 7,000 pounds carrying up to nine passengers. The two-tiered regulation on so-called “small” eVTOLs is described by EASA as a “first building block” to integration of hybrid and electric VTOL aircraft that […]

Boeing has announced that it will be providing $100 million in funds “to address family and community needs” of people impacted by the fatal crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, both Boeing 737 MAX aircraft. According to the company, the money will go to support education, hardship and living expenses, […]

Distractions are a dangerous element in flying, whether IFR or VFR. A distraction is the process of diverting one’s attention from a required area of focus or task— thereby hindering, or even completely blocking the reception of vital information or addressing a critical task. Mental interruptions may be caused by several things; the lack of […]