Risk Management

While drones are increasingly used near crowds, the FAA still prohibits their flight directly over people. As a means of gaining FAA approval to fly drones over crowds, a company called Indemnis has developed a fast-deploying ballistic parachute that’s designed to resist entanglement if the aircraft is tumbling or spinning, thus making crowd flights safer. […]

The Aviation Safety Reporting System, ASRS, is a means of confidentially and anonymously reporting unsafe conditions—including your own actions—in aviation, generally without fear of FAA enforcement. Most of us are at least somewhat aware of the ASRS program, but few of us really understand how it works. This is an important program that is of […]

The NTSB has opened the docket on Air Canada Flight 759, which mistakenly overflew a taxiway at San Francisco International Airport, barely missing four other airplanes. Information released by the NTSB included the video below, showing Flight 759 in the upper left, and more than 500 pages of reports, interviews, documents and data on the […]

A new FAA Airworthiness Directive responding to the recent engine failure on a Southwest 737 will require initial and repetitive inspections of the fan blades in CFM56-7B engines, based on the accumulated fan-blade cycles, the FAA said on Tuesday. The AD (PDF), scheduled to be published on Wednesday, aims to “address the risk of fan-blade […]

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) is recommending mandatory installation of lightweight flight recording systems by all commercial and private business operators not currently required to carry them. The TSB is also concerned with Transport Canada’s reactive approach to oversight of private business aircraft operations. The details are in the investigation report (A16P0186) released […]

One of several safety-related issues that has emerged from the fatal engine failure on Southwest Flight 1380 is passenger response to safety briefings. Perhaps most striking in this instance is that in spite of the usual preflight run-down on the proper use of oxygen masks, video from the Southwest emergency shows several passengers with masks […]

I’ve amended the details a bit to preserve anonymity. The pilot and his family came to grief on a flight that was forecast to be VFR. There was a slow-moving warm front approaching, but it appeared the 150-nm trip could be completed before conditions worsened. Friends of the pilot indicated he had intended to launch […]

The NTSB hosted a roundtable discussion to examine available solutions for preventing loss of control accidents in general aviation and to identify a path to improving GA safety on April 24. According to the board, accidents involving loss of control still account for more GA accident deaths than any other single factor. The focus of […]

AVweb’s General Aviation Accident Bulletin is taken from the pages of our sister publication, Aviation Safety magazine, 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 at www.ntsb.gov. Final reports […]

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the April 2016 issue of our sister publicationAviation Consumer. The day had started out so well. You flew out to meet with a client and wrapped up a big sale. On the way home you got some time in the clag and shot an approach to your non-towered […]