Accident Probes

The mission was to help ferry a friend’s airplane from the U.S. East Coast to their new home in Nevada. Their Skyhawk was a tried and true friend, with a number of mods that made the trip less of an ordeal than it might sound. To complete the mission, I had planned a three-day jaunt, […]

December 1, 2019, Union City, Tenn. Cirrus SR22 The pilot later reported the airplane encountered a crosswind gust and drifted left while landing. At touchdown, a second gust lifted the right wing, the airplane drifted off the runway centerline and the left wing dragged in the grass. The airplane left the runway, collapsing the landing […]

No matter how successful we are in life, there’s always someone with a bigger house, a newer car and a better job to help keep us honest. That’s certainly true in aviation, where we’re often left to wonder how some pilots can get away with buying and flying more airplane than they can handle. You […]

To help reduce the occurrence of wrong surface incidents, runway incursions and other high-risk events at U.S. airports, the FAA has developed its “From the Flight Deck” YouTube video series. The new videos target general aviation audiences with discussions of real-life wrong-surface events and guidance for pilots who may need a refresher. Each four-to-five-minute video […]

On November 6, 2019, the crew of a Republic Airways Embraer EMB-175 regional jet operating a schedule passenger flight under FAR Part 121 declared an emergency shortly after takeoff from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta (Ga.) International Airport. The crew reported a pitch-trim runaway and difficulty controlling the aircraft. Among other details, the jet climbed to around […]

After a brake master cylinder was installed, the technician was unable to bleed the brake system. Fluid pulled from reservoir would return to reservoir through the same line as the internal bypass was not functioning properly. Master cylinder was disassembled and bypass was found stuck and unable to move. Metal shavings were found inside, and an O-ring was torn, with black specks mixed in with the shavings. Part replaced with new master cylinder.

Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. (Stop me if youve heard that before.) The same could be said about managing the risk of general aviation. We-both this magazine and the industry as a whole-spend a lot of time preaching to pilots about the mechanics of understanding weather forecasts, determining if the aircraft is capable, and making honest evaluations of our own performance in considering how and when to conduct a flight. But once we identify the need to mitigate a risk, we sometimes have little space left over to describe the tools we can use. Lets try to fix that.

The mission was a simple day trip from my home field in southwest Florida to a familiar destination in north-central Georgia of 407 nm, planned to take 2+30 one-way. Spend a few hours on the ground visiting with an old friend, grab a late lunch, then hop back home later the same day. The airplane was ready and willing. But the weather wasnt cooperating as I wanted. The destination airport offered its own challenges. And while I was instrument-current, I wasnt as proficient with low IFR as I would have liked.

The Pacific Northwest, for the purposes of this article, includes the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. Thats a huge hunk of territory and comprises more than 250,000 square miles for Washington, Oregon and Idaho alone. The region includes two major mountain ranges-the Cascades and the Northern Rockies-and many smaller ones, as well as several major river basins. There are major cities in the region, such as Seattle, Portland and Boise, but also thousands of square miles of largely empty land and wilderness.

A few years ago, an engineer, friend and pilot shared a story about retrieving his Cessna 182RG from the paint shop. Before he took the plane out for a run-up and test flight, he asked his even more meticulous engineer-spouse do the preflight. When she did, she discovered something rather important. The bolts and nuts that connected the elevators were just hand-tightened, unsecured by cotter pins. The bolts and nuts securing the primary pitch control surfaces were essentially ready to fall out. Not good. My friend managed a major nuclear facility in Idaho, and he shared the story with his workforce as an example why operators should trust, but verify others work.