Risk Management

From the moment the Commerce Department got its governmental mitts on pilot licensing in 1926, politics and aviation have been inextricably entwined. But rarely is that on such naked display as it was Wednesday when the FAA announced that it was joining much of the rest of the world in grounding Boeing’s 737 MAX after […]

I suspect if you walked around the back of 800 Independence Ave. in Washington, you’d find a tanker truck of Maalox with two-inch lines running into the C-suites upstairs. The political pressure on the top echelon must be like nothing else we’ve seen in quite a while. While the rest of the world rushes to […]

Gettysburg, Penn., has a nice little municipal airport (W05). Its lone runway, oriented 06/24, is 3100 x 60 feet of well-paved asphalt and located just a couple of miles northwest of the historic town’s tourist attractions, and one of the most important battlegrounds in American history. Wyoming’s Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport (48U) is a […]

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 accident, although some take longer. […]

As aviation agencies all over the world focus on the crash of a state-of-the-art Boeing 737 MAX 8 in Ethiopia, Colombian officials are pondering the fate of one of the oldest airframes in regular revenue service. A Laser Aereo DC-3, which has flown pretty much continuously since it was delivered to the U.S. Air Force […]

A teenager has petitioned the FAA to exempt him from its minimum age requirements so he can set some records. The young man, 15, wants the FAA to allow him to be a fully certificated private pilot before he turns the minimum age of 17 so he can pursue some records that would be ambitious […]

In a world that’s polarized about everything from football teams to Lady Gaga’s lipstick shade, I have learned that when I write about Cirrus aircraft accidents, two things are predictable. One, I’ll get a little trickle of email claiming that I’m in the tank for Cirrus and covering up the brand’s scandalous accident rate. And […]

The NTSB saysan Ameristar Charters MD-83 crew “did everything right” and likely saved their lives and those of 110 team members and supporters of the University of Michigan basketball team when the aircraft overran the runway at Ypsilanti Airport near Detroit last March. The aircraft’s right elevator mechanism had been damaged in a windstorm a […]

The FAA has reminded Southwest Airlines and its unionized mechanics who is really in charge when it comes to flight safety and not so subtly warned them not to let their current disputes get in the way. Southwest sued the Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association a week ago implying its members grounded dozens of its planes […]

Boeing Buys ForeFlight Beyond disappointing. Foreflight is going to get caught up in a corporate structure that will bleed all the imagination and energy out of this very important company. I certainly can’t judge the owners for “cashing” out but rest assured Boeing will raise prices and will not add “value”. What value, what strength […]