Flight Safety

I heard the aircraft part of this conversation to Grand Forks FSS at 21:05 local time recently. I was too far away to hear the controller but they wanted to know the time off for the aircraft. Cessna 1234: “I was airborne at 9:05, pause, err, ahh, make that 26:05” No further calls were made. […]

The Army has confirmed that one of its Blackhawk helicopters hit a drone while patrolling over New York City on Thursday. The collision occurred about 7:30 p.m. over Staten Island, Fox News reported. The station obtained photos of the marks left behind by the drone along with one of its rotor arms. Debris was found […]

An Italian air force pilot is dead after his Typhoon fighter crashed in the ocean during an airshow near Rome on Sunday. Capt. Gabriele Orlandi’s jet failed to recover from a loop and hit the water about a mile offshore from Terracina, about 30 miles south of Rome. Horrified spectators were watching from a beach […]

An unusual collision sent the pilot of a light aircraft to the hospital for observation and left the pilot and passenger of a helicopter unscathed at a private strip near Clearwater, Florida, on Saturday. Zack Taylor, the owner of Clearwater Air Park, told local media the Piper Arrow was landing and hit a hovering Robinson […]

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 […]

A contest sponsored by Lightspeed and CloudAhoy is inspiring general aviation pilots to draw in the sky. Contestants make line drawings using the path of their airplanes, recorded using CloudAhoy, a smartphone-based GPS flight tracking app. The concept, on a larger scale, was popularized in the last few years by jet aircraft manufacturers who used […]

“Several failures in close succession” by a jet’s flight crew were the probable cause of a runway excursion at LaGuardia Airport last October, according to the NTSB’s final report,issued Thursday. The Eastern Air Lines Boeing 737-700, a chartered flight carrying then-vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence and campaign staff, overran Runway 22 during landing. The airplane departed […]

I got an email this week from a reader on the cusp of making a small fleet purchase for a few flight schools. I was asked for an opinion on the various choices in the training market. The more you think about this, the more difficult the decision actually is. There’s simply no perfect airplane […]

The danger of carbon monoxide poisoning in aviation was the subject of two safety alerts released by the NTSB on Wednesday, one for pilots (PDF) and one for mechanics (PDF). The risk of CO poisoning is “generally overlooked and underestimated” by both pilots and mechanics, the safety board said. A defect or leak in the […]

Bruce Landsberg, who worked as a safety advocate at the AOPA Air Safety Institute for many years, has been nominated to be a member and vice chairman of the NTSB, the White House announced on Friday. Landsberg, who lives in South Carolina, served as executive director and then president of the ASI, from 1992 to […]