Risk Management

If you’ve noticed the local forecast is a little shakier than usual, you can indirectly blame the pandemic. The drastic reduction in air traffic has curtailed the flow of information from weather sensors attached to 350 of airliners as part of their Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System or ACARS. The main role of ACARS […]

The NTSB cited misfueling in an accident that injured three people aboard a State of Alaska Shrike Commander in late May. The aircraft was being used to deploy firefighting personnel when it was refueled at Aniak, Alaska, on May 28. According to the report, the operation went pretty much by the book, except that Jet […]

An MIT study says blocking the middle seat in airliners cuts the risk of transmission of the coronavirus by almost half. Forbes is reporting that the MIT paper, which has not been peer reviewed, says the chance of getting the virus on a packed airplane is about one in 4300 but keeping the middle seats […]

American Airlines has announced it will run its flights at full capacity starting July 1. In the past few months American and most other airlines have blocked off all or some of the middle seats in Economy but that will stop on Wednesday. “As more people continue to travel, customers may notice that flights are […]

As IFR pilots, we know that general aviation carries inherent risks. Sure, if we hide behind the stellar record of the airlines, general aviation looks safe, but our accident rate is many times higher than the airlines. Of course, most of us do our best to avoid gracing the pages of an NTSB report by […]

Rusty pilots, lighter-than-normal aircraft and new procedures have combined to create some anxious moments for passengers and crews as the airline industry coped with the coronavirus pandemic, according to Bloomberg. The news agency said the Commercial Aviation Safety Team, made up of representatives from the FAA, unions and airlines, has issued about 50 safety warnings […]

There’s a multitude of good reasons pilots should do a thorough walkaround before every flight and the occupants of an Icon A5 found yet another one earlier this month. The pilot and his passenger had just finished washing the sporty little amphib on the afternoon of June 3 and were taking it out for a […]

The FAA is proposing fine tuning a massive proposed AD on Piper Cherokee wing spars and removing more than a third of the aircraft originally covered. It’s also added a few models but the net reduction is 8,800 airframes from the original list of more than 20,000. The five aircraft removed from the list are […]

There was likely a lively debrief after a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) AS350 B3 helicopter and an RCMP SkyRanger R60 surveillance drone collided while on a joint mission over a rural area of British Columbia in February. Although the incident happened in February, it didn’t make it to the Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting […]

If there’s one thing pilots are taught during their primary training, it’s to respect the limitations of the airplane they are flying. These can involve the detailed operating limits—especially airspeeds—found in the airplane’s flight manual, demonstrated crosswind capabilities, loading configurations, prohibitions against flight in known icing…the list is seemingly endless. Those limitations exist for a […]