Accidents

An American Airlines copilot safely landed an Airbus A320 in Syracuse, New York, yesterday after the captain became ill and died on the scheduled flight from Phoenix to Boston. American Flight 550 left Phoenix at 11:55 p.m. local time Sunday with 147 passengers onboard and diverted mid-flight, landing shortly after 7 a.m. EDT on Monday. […]

An unlicensed pilot in rural south Georgia, about 100 miles from Savannah, crashed his homebuilt plane on September 16 at about 3:40 a.m., killing all five people on board. No probable cause was identified in a preliminary report from the National Transportation and Safety Board last week, and there is no evidence of mechanical defects […]

A Piper Aerostar used in the Tom Cruise film “Mena” crashed near Medellin, Colombia, on Friday, killing two and leaving one in critical condition. The U.S. embassy confirmed the crash Sunday, but did not release the names of the occupants. However, local reports say the victims of the deadly crash were veteran Hollywood pilot Alan […]

The 157 passengers and 13 crew members aboard a British Airways Boeing 777 that suffered what appears to be a catastrophic uncontained engine failure during the takeoff roll are lucky to be alive after a serious fire and billowing black smoke severely damaged the jetliner on the runway at Las Vegas International Airport yesterday. Had […]

The National Transportation Safety Board today blamed the deadly crash of a Gulfstream IV last year in Bedford, Massachusetts, on pilot error, saying the crew exhibited a “long-term pattern” of failing to complete preflight checklists that contributed directly to the accident. At a hearing in Washington, D.C., this morning, the Board said that the GIV’s […]

The UK’s Air Accident Investigation Branch has issued its initial report on the tragic accident in which a Hawker Hunter T7 crashed during a demonstration flight at an airshow at the Shoreham Airport. The report confirmed that 11 people on the ground died as a result of the crash while the pilot surprisingly survived, albeit […]

The King Air had been airborne for just 30 minutes, en route from Pine Bluff to Bentonville in Arkansas, when it began its descent from 16,500 feet. The weather was clear, and the 3,400-hour private pilot, 72, was on VFR flight following with Razorback Approach at Fort Smith. Nine minutes after leaving 16.5, he told […]

So far it’s unconfirmed, but the FAA is taking seriously a report that a Piper twin was involved in a midair collision with a UAV over northern Illinois on August 27. Maybe we should be calling it a UFO, since the FAA’s incident report refers to a collision between the Piper Apache and an “unidentified […]

A tragic accident happened on Friday as aerobatic pilot Andrew Wright was preparing for a performance at the New York Air Show at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, New York. Based on footage taken from a photographer on the ground, it appears that the entire tail section of Wright’s Giles G-202 airplane was torn off […]

The service was at a Presbyterian church in a small town east of Cincinnati — about a 30-minute flight in the Cessna 180. I had planned to fly there and commandeer the airport’s retired police car, but my airplane wouldn’t start. When I jumped in and “cranked,” it wouldn’t fire — odd, because it was […]