Flight Safety

The captain of MH370 is now the “chief suspect” in the loss of the aircraft after investigators found some deleted files in his elaborate home flight simulator. According to various reports, Capt. Zaharie Shah flew a route on the sim that ended on a runway on a remote, still unidentified, island in the southern Indian […]

Letter of the Week:USA Today‘s Strategy Only a personal injury lawyer would write a Lettre de Cachet like the black adventure story published in USA Today. My sympathies for their reduced ad revenues and declining circulation. But holding public executions and sensational smear campaigns has never worked for any publication. Even the networks hesitate to […]

Lots of pilots walk away from plane crashes but Fred Jackson admits he snuck away from one in Altamont, N.Y., June 14. Jackson told the Albany Times Union he was trying to keep the crash of his newly restored Piper Clipper from the FAA when he shinnied down a tree and left the expensive aircraft […]

In a previous blog, I commented on USA Todays attempt at an expose on the supposedly awful safety record of general aviation. I think most of us will concede that despite the reports flawed perspective and flat out factual errors, it raised some legitimate issues. But lacking any aviation sense, it failed to suggest solutions. […]

Arent we pilots a confident crowd? We are so certain of our flyingskills that its always the other pilot, the below average mope, that people should be worried about. Because, in a time of need, we truly know we will rise to the challenge and our innate aeronautical skills will be there to save ourselves […]

More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a yearlong Washington Post investigation. Since the outbreak of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military drones have malfunctioned […]

AVweb’s weekly review of the news in aviation revealed a weather research project looking for pilot volunteers, new sunglasses from Scheyden Precision Eyewear, the schedule for the first ICAO Global Aviation Cooperation Symposium and new dates for the U.S. Sport Aviation Expo. Researchers at Purdue, Western Michigan, and Kent State Universities are conducting FAA-sponsored research […]

Three men are reportedto have been killed in the crash of an IAI Westwind II on the northwest side of the Huntsville, Ala., Airport Wednesday afternoon. The airplane appears to have been on a training flight, with flight instructor Robin Gary Smith of Yukon, Okla., and operator of the training company Jet Contrails, reportedly among […]

FlyersRights.org, an airline passenger advocacy organization, has released a statement expressing criticism of the FAAs Extended range Twin Operation (ETOPS) approval for the Boeing 787 and the 787-9 for up to 330 minutes flying time from a primary or alternate airport. It allows the aircraft to be used over routes traditionally reserved for three- and […]

While reading over USA Todays exhaustive-and exhausting-indictment of general aviation, I was struck by the inescapable feeling that Id been given the Disney tour of every plaintiffs file room for the past 40 years, without benefit of hearing what cross examination revealed in the court cases this reporting obviously leaned so heavily upon. So much […]