Risk Management

One issue that comes up with building an aircraft is where and how the pilot learns to fly the aircraft. Many believe it’s the old adage of “kick the tires and light the fires.” But speaking from the insurance side…I don’t think so. When a person is working on their license, they are required to […]

Three people died when a Piper Arrow and a Luscombe collided near McKinney, Texas, Saturday. The aircraft were near Aero Country Airport when they came together. One crashed onto a road and another hit a storage yard and caught fire, burning some of the goods in the yard along with the airframe. The occupants haven’t […]

Every year structural icing claims a small but steady number of airplanes. Many of the accidents are on approach in clear air—after the airplane has already collected a load of ice. We look at them afterward and wonder—the airplane had been doing fine—why did it crash well after it escaped from icing conditions? Full-scale airframe […]

EAA and AOPA have filed formal comments with the FAA that raise questions about the agency’s proposed Airworthiness Directive regarding certain NavWorx ADS-B units. AOPA asked the FAA to provide more information about the unit’s reported deficiencies, and to better explain the necessity for the proposed AD. “The safety benefits offered by UAT [Universal Access […]

Transport Canada has issued a Civil Aviation Safety Alert recommending owners and maintainers of virtually all older Piper Cherokees perform magnetic particle inspection of the welds on the control columns of their aircraft at the next annual. As we reported last May, a Canadian flight instructor reported the column broke off in his hands as […]

Most pilots are content do drone along in the straight-and-level, rarely banking beyond 30 degrees or pitching up and down beyond 10. Meanwhile, aerobatic pilots enthuse in their ability to fly upside down, vertically and in all combinations. Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes are what the FAA calls “performance maneuvers,” generally thought […]

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 web site atwww.ntsb.gov. Final reports […]

The FAA is hoping to avoid millions of laser strikes this holiday season with a warning about seasonal laser projectors. “The FAA’s concern is that lasers — regardless of the source — not be aimed at aircraft where the beams can threaten the safety of a flight,” the agency’s Eastern Region offices said in a […]

The Harvard School of Public Health says 12.6 percent of pilots surveyed may have clinical depression and 4.1 percent reported having suicidal thoughts within the two weeks prior to completing the questionnaire. The study, the first to probe pilot mental health directly rather than through information gleaned from accident investigations, was conducted anonymously and the […]

I’ve never felt it was appropriate that a pilot could obtain an instrument rating without flying in the clouds. From a safety standpoint—no matter what type of flying the pilot intends to undertake—it seems beyond ludicrous. I received instrument dual in IMC at a small airport in rural Iowa; one would think that it would […]