Risk Management

For the second time in a week, Canadian authorities are investigating a crash involving an apparently stolen aircraft, this time with tragic consequences. The Piper Tomahawk crashed on a main street in Peterborough, Ontario, about 1:30 a.m. local time Friday. The pilot and lone occupant was killed in the crash. The plane hit an illuminated […]

The Coulson Air Tankers Martin Mars is back at its home base in British Columbia after being damaged in an accident at AirVenture 2016. CEO Wayne Coulson told AVweb the aircraft flew from Lake Winnebago to Port Alberni last Tuesday with temporary repairs to holes in the hull. The plane was immediately pulled to dry […]

The International Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (IAOPA) is pressing the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to adopt the so-called driver’s license medical as the standard for all private pilots. At the recent World Assembly held in Chicago just before AirVenture 2016, the 63 delegates from 28 member nations passed the following resolution: “The IAOPA […]

The builder of a replica of the Bugatti 100p racing plane was killed in the crash of the aircraft in Oklahoma on Saturday. NewsOn6 reported Scotty Wilson, of Tulsa, was flying the aircraft when it went down near Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base in west central Oklahoma. The aircraft was copied from a 1930s design by […]

The stats are in, the tallies tallied and the totals have been summed up: Loss-of-control tops the list of general aviation accident causes. Recent studies by industry and government point to loss-of-control (LOC) accidents in all their variations are the leading cause of GA accidents, both fatal and otherwise. According to the U.S. Government Accountability […]

When Los Angeles Times reporter Nigel Duara was fishing for a third-day lead on the tragic balloon crash in Texas Monday, the graph practically wrote itself: “The pilot of a hot-air balloon that crashed into a Texas pasture had four convictions for drunken driving on his record, but was not required to submit to the […]

The NTSB said Sunday that the hot air balloon that crashed in Texas early Saturday killing 16 people likely hit power lines before the balloon’s basket crashed to the ground. Although witnesses reported hearing popping sounds and seeing a fireball, it still hasn’t been determined whether the fire occurred before or after the balloon appeared […]

The great book Fate is the Hunter by Ernest K. Gann well describes the grip of fear that most have observed in our fellow pilots and perhaps in ourselves. Fear is of course a primordial, natural, and quite healthy reaction to unknown and threatening situations. Flying perfectly describes such a situation—an obvious venture away from […]

If you didn’t take time to click on and watch this week’s video on a Navy E2C carrier mishap earlier this year, I recommend it. Put yourself in the pilot’s seat of the Hawkeye and you’ll appreciate the remarkable outcome. As the story explains, the Hawkeye was involved in carrier workups off the North Carolina […]

Two pilots who spent almost 24 hours swimming for shore from the airplane they ditched have been released from the hospital. David McMahon and Sydnie Uemoto put down in the ocean between Oahu and Kona, on the Big Island, after unspecified technical problems with the plane. They issued a Mayday about 3:15 p.m. Thursday and […]