Accidents

The airport at Los Alamos, New Mexico, lies on a mesa with ravines on three sides and rising terrain to the west. The 6,000-foot runway, 7,200 feet above sea level, is oriented east-west, with a slight upslope to the west. Because of the noise sensitivities of a community just beyond the departure end of Runway […]

On the two-year anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, search teams in Australia continue to scour the Indian Ocean for the missing Boeing 777 as family members of the victims gather to mark the solemn date, which is still punctuated by many more questions than answers. In Beijing, some supporters held a […]

Another successful Cirrus parachute pull has been captured on video, this time when a father and daughter floated to safety after a loss of engine power over Long Island on Saturday afternoon. The pair climbed out of the SR22 and walked away unharmed after touching down in a grassy area in an industrial park in […]

“The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of this accident was Scaled Composites’ failure to consider and protect against the possibility that a single human error could result in a catastrophic hazard to the SpaceShipTwo vehicle. This failure set the stage for the copilot’s premature unlocking of the feather system as a […]

“This is 176, we’re coming in over Cape Cod descending, we have a magnetic chip detector light, we’d like to declare an emergency — and we’re heading for home plate.” It was August 1978. One seventy-six was a Grumman US-2B Tracker, a Navy utility plane nicknamed “Stoof” from the type designation of one common model, […]

Two years after the disappearance of Flight MH370, a potential clue washed ashore on a sandbar in Mozambique this weekend. Australian Minister for Infrastructure and Transport Darren Chester told parliament that, while it’s “too early to speculate the origin of the debris at this stage,” the metal chunk was found in a location that’s consistent […]

The tiny, private dirt strip, 1,800 feet long, was way out in the boondocks. Oriented north to south, it was parallel to an ­unpaved county road and screened by a line of trees. By the other side of the strip to the east was a small crescent-shaped lake. Pine woods surrounded both, cleared for a few […]

“You can’t teach judgment.” “I’m afraid no amount of ‘risk management’ training is going to change your attitude.” These comments were in response to John’s May column, “Double Trouble at Denver.” John had revealed our incredible series of risk-management failures on a trip in the early ’70s — getting caught in a snowstorm in two separate airplanes […]

Although the term “precision approach” merely means that vertical guidance is included, it seems to imply that the approach ought to be executed with precision by both pilots and controllers. On a December evening in 2013, a Cessna 310 carrying a pilot, 60, and his two daughters, 17 and 20, crashed while executing a missed […]

A tourist taking photos at Pearl Harbor caught a frightening moment on video when a helicopter giving a tour of the area crashed into the water right in front of him. The video footage shows the Bell 206B quickly lose altitude over the water near the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii before crashing down Thursday […]