Risk Management

A Minnesota pilot who pulled the parachute on his Cirrus SR22 over a wilderness area of Quebec says he hopes his well-documented account of his experience can help others if they find themselves in similar straits. Matt Letinen, the CEO of a Minnesota mining company, was flying back from a mine his company operates in […]

The FAA is investigating whether the pilot of a medevac helicopter fell asleep at the controls while taking a patient to the hospital. In a statement to a Boston television station, the agency confirmed it was looking into an incident June 24 involving the Boston MedFlight flight from Martha’s Vineyard to a Boston hospital. Boston […]

The NTSB has issued a Safety Alert asking jet fuel providers to take measures to prevent fuel contamination by diesel exhaust fluid (DEF). The board warned that the addition of DEF to jet fuel can cause a chemical reaction that forms crystalline deposits in the fuel system, increasing the risk of engine failure due to […]

When I first started training to fly multi-engine airplanes, it was solemnly explained to me that there were a few things the CFI and weren’t going to do. Yes, we were going to do stalls, but only from 5000 feet AGL or more. They all would be straight-ahead and power-off to the pre-stall buffet, followed […]

A United Airlines captain and his first officer are in jail in Scotland awaiting a court appearance Tuesday on charges they planned to fly a Boeing 757 full of passengers to Newark while impaired. The flight deck crew, aged 61 and 45, were intercepted in the airport and prevented from boarding for the scheduled 9 […]

Canadian authorities appear to have a well-documented and recorded case of hypoxia in their investigation of the stall/spin fatal accident involving a Piper Navajo a year ago. On Aug. 1, 2018, an Aries Aviation PA-31, a well-maintained aircraft regularly flown by experienced pilots, inexplicably spun into a 10,000-foot mountain peak while on initial descent to […]

Becoming disoriented in flight is one of the most terrifying experiences pilots can have. In extreme cases, it leads to loss of control, controlled flight into terrain or even an inflight breakup. Less extreme experiences lead to pilot deviation or, more optimally and after the afflicted pilot is safely back on the ground, the expense […]

French inventor Franky Zapata says his flyboard used in an attempt to cross the English Channel on Thursday worked perfectly but he’s going to get a bigger boat for the next attempt. The former competitive jet ski champion was trying to cover the 30-mile stretch of water on the 110th anniversary of Louis Bleriot’s first […]

“Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it.” (Stop me if you’ve heard that before.) The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We—both this magazine and the industry as a whole—spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, […]

A new issue with the Boeing 737 MAX autopilot has emerged in the European Aviation Safety Agency’s bottom-line position on returning the airliner to service. Bloomberg, citing an unnamed source, is reporting EASA listed five major issues that need resolution and four of those have been widely discussed publicly. But the European regulator has also […]