Flight Safety

As a student pilot I badly embarrassed myself by making about six go-arounds while trying to land at an airport in a gusting crosswind. My instructor had told me to land there, so I had then told myself that I had to land there—there was no alternative. I also had internalized that go-arounds were a […]

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is testing out a program that will allow seaplane pilots to clear customs via its Reporting Offsite Arrival – Mobile (ROAM) app. There are currently only two locations where this service is available for seaplanes: Scott’s Seaplane Base on Crane Lake, and at the Shagawa Lake Seaplane Base in […]

While drones are increasingly used near crowds, the FAA still prohibits their flight directly over people. As a means of gaining FAA approval to fly drones over crowds, a company called Indemnis has developed a fast-deploying ballistic parachute that’s designed to resist entanglement if the aircraft is tumbling or spinning, thus making crowd flights safer. […]

The Aviation Safety Reporting System, ASRS, is a means of confidentially and anonymously reporting unsafe conditions—including your own actions—in aviation, generally without fear of FAA enforcement. Most of us are at least somewhat aware of the ASRS program, but few of us really understand how it works. This is an important program that is of […]

The NTSB has opened the docket on Air Canada Flight 759, which mistakenly overflew a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport, barely missing four other airplanes. Information released by the NTSB included the video below, showing Flight 759 in the upper left, and more than 500 pages of reports, interviews, documents and data on the […]

UPDATED: An Air National Guard WC-130 Hercules crashed near the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) in Savannah, Georgia, on Wednesday. It has been confirmed that there were nine people onboard, all of whom were killed in the accident. A press release from the National Guard 165th Airlift Wing stated that the aircraft was on training […]

Build A Plane, the nonprofit that offers kids a chance to restore an airplane using donated aircraft, now is expanding into rocketry, and with help from a major unnamed donor, recently bought up the assets of XCOR, the bankrupt company that had been working to build the Lynx spaceplane, for $1.1 million. “Our donor heard […]

The rollout of the FAA’s streamlined low-altitude airspace approval for drones rolled out this week with few hiccups, according to an FAA official at the AUVSI XPONENTIAL show in Denver. Wider deployment is expected later this year. The program is called Low Altitude Authorization Notification Capability—LAANC—and is the product of a cooperative effort between the […]

Vashon Aircraft wants to revolutionize light aircraft manufacture with the Vashon Ranger, an all-metal light sport aircraft intended to be both a sort of RV for outback flying and a trainer. In this AVweb video, Paul Bertorelli dives deep into the Vashon story, including an in-depth report on the factory. view on YouTube

A new FAA Airworthiness Directive responding to the recent engine failure on a Southwest 737 will require initial and repetitive inspections of the fan blades in CFM56-7B engines, based on the accumulated fan-blade cycles, the FAA said on Tuesday. The AD (PDF), scheduled to be published on Wednesday, aims to “address the risk of fan-blade […]