Accidents

During the NTSB’s probe into the February 2019 crash of an Atlas Air Boeing 767 into a marshy area in Trinity Bay, Texas, the board determined the crew lost control of the airplane as it approached Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH). The accident, an all-cargo flight, killed both pilots and also took the life […]

Twenty-five years ago, a Seattle-area pilot tried to do his mother a favor. He would take her to visit a friend on the other side of the Cascades. Their route would go through the Snoqualmie Pass, which, on the day of the trip, was unfortunately beset by fog and low-lying clouds. The pilot was instrument-rated, […]

The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of the accident to be “The operator’s decision to allow a flight in an airplane with known, unresolved maintenance discrepancies, and the flight crew’s failure to properly configure the airplane in a way that would have allowed the emergency or parking brake systems to stop the […]

On January 29, 2019, a Bell 407 helicopter operating as an air ambulance flight by Batesville, Arkansas-based Survival Flight crashed near Zaleski, Ohio, killing the pilot, the flight nurse and the flight paramedic. The helicopter impacted heavily forested terrain just before 7 am local time in deteriorating weather while enroute to transfer a patient from […]

The cover story in The New York Times magazine for September 22, 2019, was entitled, “What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max?” The writer, William Langewiesche—son of the sainted author of Stick and Rudder, Wolfgang Langewiesche—is a veteran of Flying, an experienced pilot, and a thorough and technically savvy researcher of his wide-ranging articles […]

After reading, rereading and ruminating over an article on the direction of relative wind as affected by slips and skids, I still wasn’t getting it. Because I don’t have Peter Garrison’s number, I called another friend who has written extensively about all things aeronautical, and as expected, he patiently dumbed it down to where even […]

Effective March 9, 2020, the FAA has released an airworthiness directive calling for the inspection of Cessna 210s in a specific model range, to determine the presence of corrosion and evidence of fatigue in the carry-through spar lower cap and carrying out mitigating preventative maintenance. The AD comes as the result of an in-flight breakup […]

When an accident’s cause is not easily found.

A Cirrus SR22T, N288WT, on January 27, 2020, crashed in mountainous terrain about five miles northeast of Aspen, Colorado (ASE), not long after takeoff. Both occupants, a couple from Verona, Wisconsin, near Madison, survived the mid-morning crash without injury after the pilot activated the aircraft’s ballistic parachute system. Rick Beach, safety chairman at the Cirrus […]

The National Transportation Safety Board on Friday published a number of details the board has gathered from ADS-B tracking data, ground-based video camera footage and witnesses since the January 26 crash of a Sikorsky S76, N72EX, in the hilly terrain near Calabasas, California. The flight, operated under Part 135 by Island Express Helicopters Inc., was […]