Flight Safety

All three on board walked away with minor injuries after two aircraft — an ultralight and a glider — collided in midair on Sunday afternoon near Rheinland-Pfalz airfield in Winningen, Germany. The two aircraft met at roughly right angles and became wedged together, and the ultralight pilot was able to deploy a ballistic chute that […]

AVweb’s regular perusal of SocialFlight found enough excitement for any aviation junkie this weekend-from the Reno Air Races through Wings and Wheels events to a breakfast tradition that has been going on since 1938. The National Championship Air Races-the world’s fastest motorsport, bar none-have already started at Reno Stead Airport, Nevada, and will run through […]

Tuesday, the NTSB released a report on pilot drug use that, based on post-crash toxicology tests on pilots killed in aircraft accidents from 1990 through 2012, concluded drug use of all types, particularly over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, is up among pilots and that the risk of pilot impairment is on the rise. However, the study did […]

UPS Flight 1354 crashed at the Birmingham, Alabama, airport in August 2013 because the crew continued an unstabilized approach, the NTSB said on Tuesday. “The crew failed to monitor the altitude and inadvertently descended below the minimum descent altitude when the runway was not yet in sight,” the NTSB said in a statement. Factors contributing […]

When I was at the Pipistrel factory in Slovenia last April, the techs were patiently amused while I wrapped a wing-mounted GoPro camera with a safety layer of duct tape. I’d stuck the thing under the wing with the standard GoPro 3M pressure sensitive base. “You know,” one of them said, “we never do that. […]

Broken Dreams: The Boeing 787, a documentary by the Al Jazeera investigative unit, alleges that workers in the company’s South Carolina plant “have little faith in the Dreamliner.” Unidentified workers allege that the schedule takes precedence over safety and quality; some say they believe other workers are taking drugs while at work, and several say […]

True story: During my first visit to AirVenture, known as “Oshkosh,” around 1996, I brought my hand held radio to listen to the tower. I heard a guy ask one question:“Tower, can you tell me where the traffic is?” Tower responded:“Sir, their is traffic in front of you, behind you, to your left, to your […]

Last July, an FAA spokesperson gave stunning testimony before Congress-she said that the FAA was going to miss its December 2015 deadline for the rewrite of FAR Part 23 to simplify small aircraft certification by at least two years. As would be expected, the aviation community expressed its fury. Members of Congress sent letters to […]

Its never good when a general aviation accident leads the evening news, but that was the case Friday when a TBM 900 became a ghost flight off the South Carolina coast and continued south before crashing in the water off Jamaica early in the afternoon. As we reported, the TBM departed Rochester, New York on […]

Parimal Kopardekar, principal investigator for NASA’s Unmanned Aerial Systems Traffic Management (UTM) project, is working to create a systemthat would help make it possible for UAS to operate in specified low-altitude zones within the national airspace. He talked with AVweb’s Mary Grady about the technology and its timeline. Duration: 9:45 File Size: 9.1 MB download […]