Flight Safety

When Boeing finally digs itself out of the self-inflicted PR disaster of the 737 MAX story—if it ever does—I wonder how it will be graded on handling the crisis. I wonder, but I’m kinda disposed to think it will become a textbook case of how not to behave in the searing glare of catastrophic bad […]

Southwest Airlines, Boeing’s biggest customer for the troubled 737 MAX, said this week that the airplane maker’s documentation incorrectly claimed that its aircraft had operable angle-of-attack disagree warning lights. But Boeing informed Southwest that the AoA function was actually inoperative only after the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last October. Even as Boeing finishes software […]

Addressing shareholders in Chicago Monday, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg spoke to reporters about the 737 MAX’s troubled MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). “The MCAS system as originally designed met our design and safety analysis criteria,” he said. When asked if the MCAS was the cause of both Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines accidents, Muilenburg sidestepped […]

Let’s start by dispensing with the obvious: “Loss of control in flight” is a lousy explanation, and not much better as a description. Eventually we’ll come up with something better, which hopefully will reflect the myriad ways pilots can let aircraft get away from them. Spatial disorientation in IMC is as different from a moose […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine. 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 atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the accident, although some take longer. […]

A Bellanca Viking that crashed mysteriously overnight this week at the Henderson City, Kentucky, airport had cocaine and cash on board, according to local authorities. Police say that the two aboard, Barry Hill, 47, and George Tucker, 48, both from Sanford, North Carolina, were carrying a duffel bag of cash and suspected cocaine. “Investigators believe […]

If I had been sipping coffee on the morning I read Barry Schiff’s column in the April AOPA Pilot magazine, I would have spewed java all over the page, making me look like an unemployed comedian, and making the column difficult to read. Fortunately, the coffee was still brewing. You’re probably an AOPA member, so […]

The pilot walked away (after being helped to the ground) but left authorities in western Idaho to figure out how to retrieve his airplane from the top of a 60-foot fir tree. John Gregory took off last week from McCall, Idaho, and lost power in his Super Cub. He headed for a clearing but a […]

Like peanut butter and jelly, Southwest Airlines and Boeing have been inextricably linked but maybe not so much anymore. Southwest officials have reportedly been asking questions about the Airbus A220, the highly regarded former Bombardier CSeries single-aisle program acquired by Airbus last year and now being operated by Delta, Korean Air and Swiss, among others. […]

Cathay Pacific and various authorities are investigating the mysterious “loss of visual acuity” experienced by two long-serving captains on separate flights in different aircraft types in January and February of this year. In the first instance, a 777 skipper with 4,000 hours in that left seat (27,500 hours total) had trouble seeing for about 30 […]