Flight Safety

Heard at ILG (Wilmington, DE) on a Sunday. ILG is a training site for ATC, and also has very, very patient controllers. Tower: Cherokee XYZ, let me explain how we do things. When I give you a clearance, you need to read it back so I know you understood. Cherokee XYZ: OK, I understand. Tower: […]

Five people died in the crash of a Cessna 340 at Bartow Airport in Florida after the aircraft took off in dense fog early Sunday. A prominent Lakeland lawyer, his two daughters and two others were killed in the crash, which occurred near the end of the runway. The lawyer, aged 70, and his passengers, […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine 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 web site at www.ntsb.gov. Final […]

The Canadian government has suspended the operating certificate of West Wind Airlines after the crash of one of its ATR 42 airliners near a remote Saskatchewan airport that injured 25 people. Transport Canada ordered the Saskatoon-based carrier to cease operations after its inspectors found unspecified deficiencies in the way the business was being run. The […]

Bipartisan bills introduced in the House and Senate this week aim to promote aviation education and careers for women and girls. Senators Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, sponsored a bill that would promote expanding the role of women in the aviation workforce. The bill would direct the FAA to create a Women in […]

You’d think a flight instructor would limit stupidity. You’d be wrong, as many accidents involved CFIs reacting too slowly to student silliness. Then there’s the Kentucky instructor whose student wouldn’t do anything dumb, so he intervened, setting the Cessna 172’s fuel selector to OFF within, he thought, gliding distance of the runway. Only the instructor […]

When an Amtrak express train on its inaugural run from Seattle to Portland (ironically as competition to the dozens of daily flights between the two cities) piled onto a freeway on Monday it was known within hours that the train lacked critical safety equipment and was going 50 mph faster than the limit for the […]

Congressman Mark DeSaulnier is pushing to get cockpit voice recorder (CVR) data saved after a string of air carrier close calls at SFO this year. “From a public safety perspective, this is unacceptable, and I am concerned that we are missing opportunities to learn from all of the facts when safety issues arise,” DeSaulnier wrote […]

I was that stage of my instrument training where I was struggling to keep the shiny side up while monitoring radios, tuning navaids, and looking at approach charts. My instructor and I were shooting a Localizer approach to 17R at David Wayne Hooks airport in Houston. It was during the winter and already dark. Thankfully, […]

After their plane crashed in the wilderness of northern Saskatchewan passengers aboard a West Wind Aviation ATR 42 spent about a half hour freeing themselves from the wreckage as local police and volunteers mustered a rescue effort. The aircraft carrying 22 passengers and three crew took off from Fond du Lac, a fly-in-only First Nations […]