Risk Management

Canadian researchers say they have debunked the long-held belief that facial hair interferes with the seal on pilot oxygen masks and at least one airline has lifted its decades-old beard ban. Air Canada, which commissioned the Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) study, says its pilots can now sport beards “to a maximum length of 12.5 millimeters […]

The United States Air Force has released the results of a branch-wide operational safety review, which identified a series of safety risks for Air Force flight crews. The report pinpointed stress posed by high operations tempos, a lack of time to properly focus on flying basics and decreased aircraft availability as potential safety concerns in […]

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 […]

If you’re lucky, you’ve gotten some of your aviation education from an instructor with extensive real-world experience. One CFI who fits that description—having flown freight, charter, airline and corporate without ever giving up teaching in the 35 years he’s had his certificate—likes to remind students of the difference between procedure and technique. The former is […]

Officials in South Sudan say an overloaded aircraft (type unknown) crashed into a river in the central part of the country, killing 19 of the 23 aboard. The aircraft was described by officials as having 19 passenger seats and said it crashed while on approach to the airport in Yirol. Among the four survivors are […]

Both overall and fatal accident rates in general aviation have reached a 10-year low according to the AOPA Air Safety Institute’s Joseph T. Nall Report. Report data showed fatal crashes decreasing to just 0.84 per 100,000 hours. This year’s Nall Report (PDF) reviewed trends in general aviation accidents from 2015, the most recent year for […]

With the advent of computer graphics and easy access to a variety of weather information on new forms of avionics and handheld devices, there is no need for an extensive textual forecast—the FA. While there are several excellent weather sources on the internet, we’ll use the NOAA suite (www.aviationweather.gov) for our illustrations. It may be […]

It’s easy to look at controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents as the kind you’ll never get into. Sure; you may suffer an engine failure from contaminated fuel, or scrape a wingtip while landing in a stiff crosswind or even forget to put down the gear before landing. But flying a perfectly good airplane into […]

In the last two years, 596 aircraft in the U.S. landed or almost landed on the wrong runway or wrong airport, and 85 percent of those events involved general aviation aircraft, according to the FAA. At a recent Safety Summit held in Leesburg, Virginia, the FAA said these types of incidents are one of the […]

The pilot and builder of the one-of-a-kind Jet Eze aircraft was killed in the crash of the airplane on approach to the airport in Covington, Tennessee, on Saturday afternoon. Lance Hooley, who adapted the canard design of Burt Rutan’s Long Eze to take a GE-T58-8 engine, died when the aircraft crashed 2,000 feet short of […]