Flight Safety

A GoFundMe campaign aimed at supplying groceries and gas money for local air traffic controllers not receiving pay during the partial government shutdown has been suspended by its founder due to the potential for ethics violations. Hearing that some controllers were struggling after missed paychecks, general aviation pilot Graeme Smith started the GoFundMe campaign on […]

Due to a mix-up on my part, I walked into the pilot’s lounge at the virtual airport an hour prior to the time I was scheduled to fly with a student. I found a magazine I hadn’t read and sunk into one of the worn, old recliners, trying to keep quiet so I wouldn’t interrupt […]

In the airline and military realm, fly-by-wire control has become old hat but because of expense and certification complexity, the technology hasn’t trickled down to light aircraft general aviation. Some in the industry, however, believe that digital control architecture and the enhanced stability it can offer might make airplanes easier to fly and would thus […]

More than two months after the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX off Indonesia, divers have recovered the cockpit voice recorder from the seabed. The recorder was dug out from beneath 26 feet of mud on the floor of the Java Sea. The aircraft dove at high speed into 100 feet of water […]

Fifteen people died when a Boeing 707 cargo plane overran the runway in bad weather at Fath Airport in Karaj, near Tehran, went through a perimeter fence and buried its nose in a house. Only a flight engineer survived. No one on the ground was injured. The old airliner shed most of its parts as […]

The FAA is proposing relaxing rules for flying drones over people and at night. The FAA released a draft of the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Monday. The NPRM will be published in the Federal Register “at a later date.” A draft Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking was also released laying the groundwork for public input […]

A front is the border where one distinct air mass meets another. More correctly it’s a frontal area, since the contact surface stretches from the ground into the upper limit of the troposphere. The area that intersects the ground is where the front is drawn on a meteorological analysis map. The front is defined based […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine, and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s website atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after […]

The government shutdown is delaying an urgent update of the World Magnetic Model, the underlying basis for all modern navigation systems, and those systems are in danger of becoming unacceptably inaccurate. Magnetic North, the wandering point near the North Pole that is the reference for navigation services, is racing away from Canada toward Siberia. It’s […]