Accidents

In December 2019, a Canadian-registry Piper Aerostar 602P with three aboard left Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to return home to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The group stopped overnight at Chino, California, east of Los Angeles—perhaps to visit the aviation museum there—and continued the next day to Nanaimo with a […]

The Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) said in May 2019 a relatively new flight instructor managed to wrestle control of a Cessna 152 away from a student pilot at just 400 feet agl after the aircraft abruptly pitched down into a steep dive at 2,000 feet agl. The instructor sustained minor injuries while the student […]

The National Transportation Safety Board has recovered the cockpit voice recorder from a Cessna Citation 560—N3RB—that crashed on January 9 on the Warm Springs Reservation approximately 75 miles southeast of Portland, Oregon. The aircraft was headed to Boise, Idaho, on an IFR flight plan and departed Portland Troutdale Airport at 1:08 pm local time (PST). […]

Several colleagues knew of a pilot’s limitations before a fatal 767 accident.

The gale-force winds that slammed into me when my windshield shattered instantly ripped off my headset, tore at the skin on my face and strained my ability to focus on anything beyond the immediate sensations assaulting me. One moment I was leveling off my Lancair Evolution at 25,000 feet. The next, I was in the […]

At the age of 27, having just made my first film, Boiler Room, I found myself riding a brand new BMW K1200RS south on the Henry Hudson Parkway in Manhattan. The bike was a gift from Ben Affleck (it’s customary to buy the director a modest gift when you wrap a film, but this was […]

Recent data from the National Transportation Safety Board says, over the past decade, the trend in general aviation accidents has been headed in a positive direction—down. In 2012, the board recorded 1,471 GA accidents, 273 of which were fatal. Those accidents claimed the lives of 440 people. The NTSB data available from 2017 lists 1,233 […]

An adventurous pilot falls for his aircraft with fatal results.

The crash of a T-6 Texan II in Alabama last week—in addition to the loss of an F-18 Hornet near China Lake California earlier in the week—was enough for the head of Naval Air Forces to call for a one-day safety stand-down that grounded all non-deployed units in an attempt to determine the cause of […]

A Daher TBM 700, N965DM, departed Manchester, New Hampshire (KMHT), on October 2 at approximately 19 minutes past 10 am bound for Buffalo, New York (KBUF), some 374 miles to the west. The pilot, a prominent New York attorney, held a private pilot certificate with an instrument rating and filed an appropriate IFR flight plan […]