Accidents

The Flight Safety Foundation says 54 percent of all accidents could potentially be avoided if the flying pilot had executed a timely go-around, simply bringing up the power and returning for another attempt at landing, often because the first approach was in some way unstable. The FSF recently learned that 83 percent of runway excursions […]

Crash investigators are beginning to piece together reports from people on the ground and information gleaned from a flight data recorder recovered from a Cessna Citation I that slammed into an unoccupied home in an Atlanta suburb Friday night. The twinjet crashed about 15 miles north of its destination, Atlanta’s Fulton County Airport, at about […]

The National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report of an MD-83 overrun accident a few weeks ago in Ypsilanti, Michigan, uncovered a mechanical problem with the right elevator of the charter airliner, although investigators say it is too early to conclusively point to the elevator as the cause of the accident. An eerie near-replay of the […]

The 109 passengers and seven crew members of an Ameristar Charters flight out of Willow Run Airport in Ypsilanti, Michigan, are all safe after their airplane slid off the runway on Wednesday. The Michigan Wolverines men’s basketball team and staff were among those on board, as they were leaving for the Big Ten tournament; however, […]

The Hawker jet was descending through 13,500 feet, near the end of a 34-minute hop from Dayton, Ohio, to Akron Fulton Airport, when one of the passengers leaned through the cockpit door. “You guys know where we’re going, right?” It was a joke, but it wasn’t far off the mark. The National Transportation Safety Board’s […]

New York Sen. Charles Schumer is calling on the National Transportation Safety Board to launch a study into a spate of small plane crashes around New York City. “We’re only a few months into 2017 and already we’ve seen two small plane crashes here in the New York metro area,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said at a […]

A passenger-carrying Flybe airliner suffered substantial damage on Thursday at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol after its landing gear collapsed on touchdown. Flight 1284, arriving from Edinburgh, Scotland, battled severe weather from Storm Doris, which struck western Europe with winds up to 100 mph. Wind gusts were reportedly at 30 to 40 mph when the Flybe pilot […]

Helicopter safety statistics released this week by the FAA indicate that years’ worth of hard work by the agency and a number of industry groups to improve operational safety are paying off. The agency reported that the raw accident rate, as well as the fatal accident rate in helicopters, recorded a downturn for the third […]

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2016 Transportation Statistics Annual Report released last week presents a cornucopia of aviation industry data. The report’s introductory look at a hot topic, infrastructure, may surprise some readers. “The majority of airport runways (commercial service, reliever, and select general aviation) are in good condition; only 2 percent are considered poor.” […]

The National Transportation Safety Board last week published its preliminary report — essentially a list of the facts gathered to this point — about the December 29, 2016, crash into Lake Erie of a Cessna Citation CJ4. The Part 91-operated jet disappeared into the dark waters of the lake about a minute after departing Cleveland’s […]