Risk Management

Most of my articles for Aviation Safety focus on managing the risk of flying piston-powered general aviation aircraft, with examples of good and poor risk management. But risk management is at least equally critical in the world of operating airliners and turbine-powered transport category aircraft. Recent air carrier accidents provide illustration and lessons relevant to […]

Liquids have been banned from certain areas of the cockpits of A350 airliners after a couple of diversions caused by spills on the center panels. The European Aviation Safety Agency has issued an emergency AD banning liquids from areas of the cockpit where spillage might muck up the electronic works of the state-of-the-art aircraft since […]

Thunderstorms are the nemesis of general aviation. We can’t penetrate them nor fly over them. Fortunately, we have several sophisticated tools at our disposal to help in the preflight planning to make that all important go/no go decision before we head into the murk. Their sophistication is remarkable, and we need to choose those that […]

Pilots are taught to take off and land into the wind, and avoid landing or departing with a tailwind. There is a reason: The performance penalty of a tailwind is much greater than the benefit of a headwind. How big a penalty? Go to your POH and calculate it. The most common figure is to […]

Passengers aboard an Air Canada Jazz flight from Montreal on Friday watched as one of the wheels fell off as it lifted off from Trudeau International Airport. At least one passenger caught the unusual event on his cellphone and it made for a good story on social media. Our friends at Flyer Magazine in the […]

The earth’s surface is about 71 percent water. Most of us will never pilot a personal aircraft long distances over oceans, but eventually flying over some body of water while beyond gliding distance to land is almost a certainty. When we do that in a single-engine aircraft, the adverse consequences of an engine failure increase […]

After dropping steadily for most of the past two decades, the helicopter accident and fatal accident rates have plateaued and the FAA is redoubling efforts to keep the numbers dropping. The U.S. Helicopter Safety Team (USHST), an FAA-led initiative with the lofty goal of eliminating helicopter fatalities, released the latest stats on accident rates and […]

A Texas family of five and a Canadian couple were killed in what may have been a weather-related Thanksgiving crash of a Cherokee Six near Kingston, Ontario, last week. Pilot Otabek Oblokulov, his wife and their three children, of Houston, and their newlywed friends from Toronto died while attempting to land in high winds and […]

A California man says he thinks the $20,000 in fines and fees he’s been assessed are unfair after his runaway drone landed next to an active runway at Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport during a visit by President Donald Trump. In fact, in the caption accompanying the video he posted to YouTube of the flight […]

The nine people killed and three injured in the crash of a Pilatus PC-12 near Chamberlain, South Dakota, on Saturday were all members of the same prominent Idaho family according to a report in eastidahonews.com. The aircraft reportedly came down about 12:30 p.m. shortly after takeoff from Chamberlain bound for Idaho Falls, Idaho. Local officials […]