Flight Safety

In partnership with Alaska Airlines, NASA is testing cockpit-based flight planning software that is designed to save time and fuel using real-time flight data. Developed by NASA, the Traffic Aware Planner (TAP) software optimizes routes using factors like real-time weather, winds, air traffic and aircraft fuel burn, including associated weight and performance changes. The tablet-based […]

We all may still be waiting for our flying cars and jetpacks, but there’s no question the future has arrived, in ways more subtle but irrefutable. There was the live video of two SpaceX rockets landing on their tails in Florida earlier this year. There’s the imminent first flight of the giant Stratolaunch space plane. […]

I was working field operations at a major airport and got this call: Ground: Ops 1, Ground. Me:Go ahead. Ground: We just got a report of a dead animal about the thousand‑foot markers on Runway 13. Me: Is that the previously reported dog that we cleared? Ground: Negative. I’m seeing feathers. From an unidentified aircraft: […]

In a recent Advisory Circular on wildlife hazards to aviation (PDF), the FAA ranked the white-tailed deer as the most dangerous animal, with 84 percent of deer strikes causing damage to the aircraft. The rest of the top 10 hazards are birds, especially the snow goose, turkey vulture and Canada goose. The only other mammal […]

The jet-powered experimental airplane that crashed and burned in Tennessee on Saturday had lost its left wing in flight, NTSB investigators said in an update on Monday afternoon. Lance Hooley, 58, of Kissimmee, Florida, died in the crash. He had worked on the airplane for 13 years and built it from his own design, adapted […]

With the advent of computer graphics and easy access to a variety of weather information on new forms of avionics and handheld devices, there is no need for an extensive textual forecast—the FA. While there are several excellent weather sources on the internet, we’ll use the NOAA suite (www.aviationweather.gov) for our illustrations. It may be […]

It’s easy to look at controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents as the kind you’ll never get into. Sure; you may suffer an engine failure from contaminated fuel, or scrape a wingtip while landing in a stiff crosswind or even forget to put down the gear before landing. But flying a perfectly good airplane into […]

In the last two years, 596 aircraft in the U.S. landed or almost landed on the wrong runway or wrong airport, and 85 percent of those events involved general aviation aircraft, according to the FAA. At a recent Safety Summit held in Leesburg, Virginia, the FAA said these types of incidents are one of the […]

Bloomberg is reporting that Pratt & Whitney has been quietly assessing excessive vibration in its new-design geared turbofan engines in the latest of a string of teething problems with the fuel-sipping design. Bloomberg says a vibration issue has caused cockpit alerts in A320neos that have been delivered to airlines all over the world. Pratt told […]

The pilot and builder of the one-of-a-kind Jet Eze aircraft was killed in the crash of the airplane on approach to the airport in Covington, Tennessee, on Saturday afternoon. Lance Hooley, who adapted the canard design of Burt Rutan’s Long Eze to take a GE-T58-8 engine, died when the aircraft crashed 2,000 feet short of […]