News

General aviation accident rates dropped in 2015 amid a rise in flight hours, according to figuresreported by the National Transportation Safety Board Thursday.The preliminary data reported for GA operations added up to 1,209 accidents last year, 229 of those involving 376 fatalities, including three people on the ground.The GA accident rate last year was 5.85 […]

The FAA’s long-awaited ADS-B rebate program is now online, and despite a few first-day glitches with the system early Monday morning that were quickly smoothed out, it’s been getting plenty of takers. “We’re up to 1,360 applicants as of the end of the day on Tuesday,” David Gray, the FAA’s program manager for ADS-B, told […]

Reno racer Thom Richard is glad to be alive after another airplane hit his disabled race plane, narrowly missing the top of his head. “The impact was violent and loud,” Richard wrote on YouTube, a fact made clear by the cockpit video clearly showing the incident. Richard had stopped on the runway to check on […]

The 60th annual Gordon Bennett long-distance balloon race launched on Monday from Gladbeck, Germany, with 24 teams competing from 12 countries. Three teams, from Great Britain, Austria and Switzerland, landed the next morning to avoid flying into military airspace that was scheduled at short notice for a military exercise. By the end of the first […]

A U.S. Air Force U-2 spy plane crashed Tuesday near Sacramento, California, about 9:05 a.m. local time while on a training mission. Both pilots on board ejected, and late on Tuesday, local KCRA News reported that one pilot was killed and the second pilot was hurt, according to officials at Beale Air Force Base. The […]

A new aviation trade show has been announced for Oct. 24-26, 2017, in Ghana, which organizers say will be the first-ever event of its kind in the West Africa region. “It’s an important announcement for the African continent, especially for Ghana, one of the most dynamic countries in Africa, which is experiencing strong economic growth […]

Clay Lacy Aviation, which operates FBOs in Los Angeles and Seattle, has joined with Key Air, based in Oxford, Connecticut, the two companies announced last week. “Our clients asked us for a larger presence in New York, and this is the first of several strategic steps to expand our East Coast services,” said Brian Kirkdoffer, […]

The grounding of the Air Force’s “operational” fleet of about 15 F-35s is being characterized as routine but as has become routine with glitches in the aircraft’s development it’s also likely to be expensive. It appears faulty materials in the avionics cooling system will have to be replaced and while that sounds simple, the likely […]

A remarkable set of circumstances and some plain good luck led to only one person being injured in the fiery crash of a Cessna 182 that took off with five people on board and ended up in the living room of a house in Gilbert, Arizona, Saturday evening. The aircraft was a jump plane and […]

Beginning this week, AVweb is introducing a new feature for readers called General Aviation Accident Bulletin. These reports, which will appear twice monthly, comprise the latest preliminary reports on general aviation accidents taken from the NTSB’s initial reporting. They offer enough detail to gain a general idea on what happened in the accident, but do […]