Risk Management

If you ride around Seattle, where Boeing lives, you’ll occasionally see a blue-and-white bumper sticker that’s been around for decades, with variations of this wording: Unless it’s a Boeing, I’m not going. Following this week’s revelation that Boeing kept pilots in the dark about an autotrim system on the new 737 MAX, it took the […]

As he does from time to time, Dave, the proprietor of the flight school here at the virtual airport, sent out a mass email to his aircraft rental customers—students and certificated pilots—asking them to come to an evening gathering to socialize and discuss an issue of interest to all of us. The evening’s theme was […]

A report released by the U.S. Air Force points to pilot error as the primary cause of an Air National Guard WC-130 Hercules crash that killed all nine servicemembers onboard. The accident occurred on May 2, 2018, shortly after takeoff from Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (SAV) in Savannah, Georgia. According to the USAF Accident Investigation […]

Boeing kept airlines and pilots in the dark about an automated background trim system on the 737 MAX that may be implicated in the first crash of the new model in Indonesia last month. The trim system, which is meant to improve pitch characteristics and stall protection, wasn’t even described in any of the documentation […]

When discussing preflight inspections, I sometimes hear pilots remark, “I don’t know what I am looking for.” That’s unfortunate, because the pilot is the final authority regarding the aircraft’s airworthiness. As a pilot, you have the responsibility to accept the aircraft as-is and be on your merry way or reject it as unsuitable if something […]

AVweb’sGeneral Aviation Accident Bulletinis taken from the pages of our sister publication,Aviation Safetymagazine, and is published twice a month. All the reports listed here are preliminary and include only initial factual findings about crashes. You can learn more about the final probable cause in the NTSB’s website atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports appear about a year after […]

It would appear an extreme sport video crew learned a harsh lesson in aerodynamics last month when the star of their video was killed in British Columbia. As we reported a couple of weeks ago, “stunt rapper” Jon James McMurray’s body was found in a farmer’s field after he had reportedly tried wingwalking while rapping. […]

A couple of runway overruns in the last few days have wrecked millions in hardware but did not hurt anyone seriously. On Friday morning, a Fly Jamaica Boeing 757 went off the end of Cheddi Jagan International Airport’s runway in Guyana and plowed into a sand pile at the lip of a 40-foot drop. The […]

A crew of six doing what appears to have been a post-maintenance check on an Astana Airlines Embraer E190 nearly ditched the aircraft in the ocean after it became uncontrollable shortly after takeoff. The crew reported multiple system failures as they endured a wild ride over the countryside northeast of Lisbon, Portugal, where the aircraft […]