Aviation Safety

The National Transportation Safety Board has created a wish list describing its most-wanted transportation safety improvements. When it comes to aviation issues, the board specifies three areas where the FAA should take action to make flying safer.

The first, reducing runway incursions, is already on the FAAs hit list as well. Control of airplanes on the ground is problematic for the FAA because the pilots (and drivers) who cause the problems are, for the most part, oblivious to the problems theyre creating.

You can talk about signage and communications all you want, but after a look at the number of people who run red lights, weve concluded runway incursions are a cultural phenom…

Malibu loses engine on takeoff and the pilot hightails it to the runway, only to come up short on altitude and airspeed.

Tucked away in labs around the country, engineers are hard at work designing the next steps in a plan that would revolutionize transportation. The goal is one any aviation buff would admire: Substantially shift personal transportation between cities from being based on personal automobiles on highways to small aircraft.

The Small Aircraft Transportation System ties together the work of other NASA and industry programs that have aimed to improve the powerplants, weather capabilities and navigation complexities of small aircraft. The visionary goal is lofty – to create a way to reduce the cost of a new jet to a point comparable to a high-end luxury vehicle in order to reduce average door-…

I flew from Ft. Worth to Denver shortly after getting my instrument ticket late last year and picked up more ice than I ever care to have on my aircraft again. Even with the prop heated on my Mooney 252, it was still shaking and shedding ice, signaling to me that it was time (a.k.a. past time) to descend to lose some ice. I remained over flat terrain in west Texas and eastern Colorado and managed to learn a lot about ice build-up and its impact on aircraft performance.

The guys on the glycol truck in Denver said theyd never seen so much ice on a small plane before – and I hope I never do again. Given the temperatures in Denver at the time, the ice remained in descent and even after sitti…

I never should have learned this lesson because I never should have made the flight. Mother Nature decided to demonstrate several of her most unnerving weather phenomena.

We were planning a flight from Los Alamos, N.M., to Amana, Iowa, for a weekend fly-in. We expected wind over the entire area of the flight for most of the planned weekend. Because of the length of the flight, we planned to leave Thursday so as to be rested when the festivities began.

The Los Alamos airport is at an elevation of 7,150 feet and is a one way airport. Takeoff is to the east and landing to the west, regardless of wind. As we drove to the airport from about 30 miles west of Los Alamos, the wind was causin…

On a gorgeous VFR day, the occupants of two airplanes never knew how close they came to having their days ruined. I watched it happen.

It was time for my biennial flight review, so my instructor and I loaded up the Citabria (sans parachutes) for some airwork in the boonies west of Orlando. Then we flew north to Leesburg, an uncontrolled airport with intersecting runways. Winds were light and there was a thin layer of cumulus that started at about 2,700 feet and went up to about 4,000.

Traffic was using runway 13, and there are lakes at both ends of the runway. Its usually a quiet little airport, although occasionally there are trainers around shooting touch-and-goes or NDB approaches…

The following information is derived from the FAAs Service Difficulty Reports and Aviation Maintenance Alerts.

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The FAA has issued a safety recommendation regarding a batch of O rings manufactured by Parker and distributed by Valtec because the rings may swell excessively when coming into contact with avgas. The problem first came to light after the fuel selector valve on a Cessna 180 was rebuilt and the engine then suffered fuel starvation. The O ring had enlarged to twice its original size. The O rings in question bear a part number of MS29513-112, a package date of 06/01 and a lot number of 60002401. The manufacturer concluded that the lot was made from the wrong materi…

As a college physics professor who uses dry ice in class, I want to underscore the danger of putting dry ice in any container that can be sealed. Pat Veillette intimates the danger: …perhaps you have considered placing the dry ice in a tightly sealed container…you have created a pressure vessel…those have inherent risks. The situation gets even worse if you have a fire.

This beats around the bush. It should be emphatically stated that dry ice in any sealed container will create a bomb whose time or force of detonation is not easily predictable.

The container could be a hard plastic ice chest with latching lid! Nor do you need a fire to make the situation worse. A few ounces o…

I had read Richard Taylors article IFR for VFR Pilots [Instrument Check, May] when I encountered the following situation:

Returning to Honolulu from Molokai, the weather was gorgeous, except for a 2,500-foot overcast as we got closer to the Class B airport. It was a Kona day, meaning the winds were coming opposite the normal tradewind direction, and the runways were reversed.

This means the general aviation approach is to runway 22, with the mountains rising behind you on final. I was VFR, and given discretion on altitude plus an early landing clearance. Visibility was over 10 miles under 2,500, but there were rain pockets beyond the airport, which were thick but isolated, and…

Troubling words from a pilots mouth: Uh, where were we?