Peter Garrison

(August 2011) It has often been said that accidents result not from one big cause, but from a lot of little ones that happen to converge in some unforeseen way. Nevertheless, many fatal accidents do arise from one simple cause: VFR pilots flying into IFR weather. This happens so regularly, and in so monotonous a […]

On April 3 there was a short e-mail from Dick Rutan to “All.” It said: Just a note … had a going away lunch at the Voyager Cafe Mojave with Burt and Tonya; after lunch they got in the car and are driving to the new home in Idaho as I write. So they are […]

(August 2011) After the nearly miraculous** retrieval of the black boxes** from Air France Flight 447, the Airbus A330 that disappeared in the mid-Atlantic in May 2009 with 228 souls aboard, it quickly became apparent that the events that led to the crash, until then magnified by the lens of mystery — a monster storm? […]

(July 2011) In November 2007, the builder-pilot of a Van’s RV-10 was killed when his engine apparently lost power at low altitude. He had relocated the batteries the night before to move the CG forward, and was checking the airplane before departing on a planned trip with his family later that day. The accident raised […]

In last month’s Aftermath, which concerned fatal accidents that the NTSB had linked to hypoxia, I was puzzled by a few that involved experienced pilots who had been flying, in one case for a rather short time, in the 12,000- to 18,000-foot altitude range without supplemental oxygen. If scrambled fighters find a maskless pilot slumped […]

(June 2011) In the February issue, Robert Goyer reported on a project to convert Cessna Skyhawks to electric power. Many Skyhawks are used as trainers, and training flights seldom last more than 90 minutes; so batteries, though notoriously lacking in stamina, might be an adequate power source for this application. Parenthetically, Robert mentioned that wingtip […]

__A search for the word hypoxia in NTSB accident reports for the past decade turns up just 15 occurrences. Of these, five do not involve our usual understanding of hypoxia as incapacitation due to protracted exposure to high altitude without supplemental oxygen; the references are, instead, to carbon monoxide poisoning from a leaky muffler, elderly […]

The story feels more like the 1920s than the 1980s. It’s about an Australian pilot named Don Adams. After serving as an engine mechanic in the Royal Australian Air Force in the final years of World War II, he returned to his native Queensland and took up crop spraying, first using a de Havilland Tiger […]

The release of preliminary flight data and cockpit voice recorder data from the miraculously recovered “black boxes” of Air France 447 opened the floodgates of press and online discussion. Amid all this chatter, the term “deep stall” often popped up. Did Air France 447 experience a deep stall? The short answer is no. It was […]

A 30-year-old commercial pilot and a passenger left Plant City, Florida, on a Saturday morning in March for a time-building trip to Las Vegas. The plan was to return around the middle of the coming week, depending on weather. The pilot had rented a Diamond DA40 for the trip, a four-seater with a 180 hp […]