Flight Safety

Officials in South Sudan say an overloaded aircraft (type unknown) crashed into a river in the central part of the country, killing 19 of the 23 aboard. The aircraft was described by officials as having 19 passenger seats and said it crashed while on approach to the airport in Yirol. Among the four survivors are […]

The U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) says drone encounters accounted for almost the entire 58 percent increase in air proximity reports (airproxes) in the past five years. The BBC analyzed data from the CAA that says the airprox total jumped from 172 in 2013, when there were no drone complaints, to 272 in 2017, including […]

AVweb blogger Paul Berge recently observed–only half in jest–that an airplane would land itself if left unattended. It has happened, as this AVweb classic video shows. The incident, which occurred in 1970, has become known as the Cornfield Bomber. After the pilot ejected because he couldn’t recover from a flat spin, the airplane righted itself […]

Both overall and fatal accident rates in general aviation have reached a 10-year low according to the AOPA Air Safety Institute’s Joseph T. Nall Report. Report data showed fatal crashes decreasing to just 0.84 per 100,000 hours. This year’s Nall Report (PDF) reviewed trends in general aviation accidents from 2015, the most recent year for […]

The FAA’s Piston Aviation Fuels Initiative (PAFI) will resume testing a possible unleaded replacement for avgas this fall, according to AOPA. The FAA suspended most PAFI testing operations in June to assess issues related to the differences between 100LL and the two unleaded test fuels—one developed by Shell and one by Swift Fuels. That announcement […]

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 […]