Risk Management

The Canadian Transportation Safety Board yesterday released its findingon a 2013 multiple-fatality midair collision between a Cessna 150 and a motor glider with an analysis that said the 150 pilot was probably wearing a baseball cap that affected his ability to see the glider. While only one of several factors mentioned regarding visibility, including relative […]

Tuesday, the NTSB released a report on pilot drug use that, based on post-crash toxicology tests on pilots killed in aircraft accidents from 1990 through 2012, concluded drug use of all types, particularly over-the-counter (OTC) drugs, is up among pilots and that the risk of pilot impairment is on the rise. However, the study did […]

When I was at the Pipistrel factory in Slovenia last April, the techs were patiently amused while I wrapped a wing-mounted GoPro camera with a safety layer of duct tape. I’d stuck the thing under the wing with the standard GoPro 3M pressure sensitive base. “You know,” one of them said, “we never do that. […]

Its never good when a general aviation accident leads the evening news, but that was the case Friday when a TBM 900 became a ghost flight off the South Carolina coast and continued south before crashing in the water off Jamaica early in the afternoon. As we reported, the TBM departed Rochester, New York on […]

The aviation industry has been warned about the possibility of flight disruptions caused by activity at Iceland’s largest volcano system. Intense seismic tremors have been recorded at Iceland’s Bardarbunga volcano for the past several days, although there are no signs yet of an eruption. Iceland’s Met Office has raised the risk level to the aviation […]

For the second time in less than three weeks, a small plane made a forced landing on a Sarasota County, Florida beach. Television station WWSB Channel 7 is reporting that just before noon Tuesday, the Air Traffic Control tower at Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport called 911. A Pitts Special reported an engine power loss and landed […]

NTSB Board member Earl Weener sat outside at a caf at AirVenture with AVwebs Rick Durden to talk about what the NTSB does, his background in aviation and some of his thoughts on improving aviation safety. Weener holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, one of three degrees he earned at that institution while […]

Standards must be slipping at CNN. Early Saturday morning, they didnt have the United 777 diversion to Midway story. I expected the network to have summoned their stadium full of talking heads to connect that incident to–what else?–Malaysian 370. I figured they could spin a couple of days of 24/7 speculation out of the Midway […]

Two brothers riding in a parasail at Myrtle Beach, S.C., got a different flight than they expected when the banner being towed by an airplane cut through their parachute last weekend. Despite damage, everyone involved landed safely. The older brother, Riley, said he knew something wasnt right when he noticed an airplane flying very close […]

Commercial drones expected to fly U.S. skies in coming years, delivering pizza or monitoring power lines, would be dangerously vulnerable to hackers without a variety of potentially costly countermeasures to their GPS navigation systems, results of a federal study indicate. According to an exclusive report in the Christian Science Monitor, a serious, but not well […]