Flight Safety

AVweb’s Flight Safety section offers in-depth coverage of aviation safety topics, including accident analyses, risk management strategies, regulatory updates, and pilot training insights. Designed for pilots, instructors, and aviation professionals, this section provides timely information to enhance situational awareness and promote best practices in flight operations.

Accident Probe: ‘Recently Purchased’

Outside of large training organizations or fleet operations, there is little standardization of equipment, systems or procedures within general aviation. Toss in a few years among different owners and identical airplanes that rolled off an assembly line together 10 or 20 years earlier will vary wildly in their equipment, maintenance history and wear and tear. […]

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Video Screen Grab Shows Close Call At Logan

The NTSB has released a screen grab of a flight deck video that shows just how close a chartered Learjet 60 came to a JetBlue ERJ-190 at Boston’s Logan Airport on Feb. 27, 2023. A pilot in the jumpseat of the regional jet was shooting video when the crew was ordered to abort its landing […]

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Who You Gonna Call?

One summer, while flying over the largest wilderness in the lower 48 states, I heard a radio call: “Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. White Cessna… [broken and inaudible transmission].” I heard just enough to understand something bad was happening, but not where. I repeatedly tried to hail the aircraft to get them to repeat their location, to […]

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Hard Landing Buckles 767 Fuselage

United Airlines’ oldest Boeing 767 is likely a write-off after the fuselage skin buckled and tore in a hard landing at Houston on July 29. The aircraft arrived from Newark at 10:34 a.m. with 193 passengers and 11 crew, none of whom were injured. Circumstances of the landing have not been released, but the crew […]

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General Aviation Accident Bulletin, July 31, 2023

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause on the NTSB’s website at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after the […]

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AirVenture Crash Victims Identified, Investigations Continue

Authorities have released the names of four people killed in two fatal accidents within three hours of each other at AirVenture 2023 Saturday. The first involved a T-6 Texan that went down in Lake Winnebago under unknown circumstances with two people on board. Dead are Devyn Reiley, 30, of New Braunfels, Texas, and her passenger […]

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Flight Attendant Hurt During Evasive Action

The FAA has confirmed it is investigating a conflict between an Allegiant Airlines A320 and a Gulfstream business jet that resulted in unspecified injuries to an Allegiant flight attendant. The Washington Post says the Allegiant crew reacted to a TCAS alert that called for an immediate climb to avoid the Gulfstream. They had just been […]

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FAA Getting Ready To Regulate Space Tourism Safety

Although the FAA may seem to be all over commercial space regulation, it’s about to fill a big gap that Congress mandated almost 20 years ago. SpaceRef is reporting the agency has struck the Human Space Flight Occupant Safety Rulemaking Committee for the Commercial Transportation Industry and it would appear the length of the name […]

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No Chat GPT In The FAA

The FAA has issued a statement saying it does not use Chat GPT to help write computer code in its air traffic operations (ATO) or in any other systems. The agency hastily issued the statement after the Department of Transportation published a list of AI use throughout its organization. The list is required for compliance […]

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FAA Tightens Certification Oversight

The FAA says it will require aircraft manufacturers to disclose the fine details of changes to safety-critical systems during the certification process for new aircraft. The agency told Reuters it will “establish milestones throughout the certification process that will help the agency assess whether any design changes to airplane systems should be considered novel or […]

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