Accidents

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 […]

The most recent general aviation safety report from AOPA’s Air Safety Institute shows an “unprecedented” decrease in non-commercial airplane accidents, dropping below 1,000 annually for the first time. It’s tempting to correlate the drop in GA fixed-wing accidents with a reduction in overall flight hours, but FAA estimates show that the safety improvement notched noteworthy […]

Accident investigators are trying to determine why a New York-area air traffic controller directed the pilot of a Beech Bonanza who died in the crash of his airplane earlier this month toward a nonexistent airport in the middle of an industrial area, possibly giving the man false hope as he desperately searched for a suitable […]

It was a tough weekend for airshows in Europe, ending with multiple fatalities of not only airshow pilots but also unsuspecting bystanders. At the Shoreham Airport in southeastern England, a Hawker Hunter, a vintage warbird jet developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, crashed in a massive fireball into the busy A27 freeway, killing […]

Five passengers and a pilot on a sightseeing flight were killed on Monday when their floatplane crashed in rugged terrain north of Quebec City. The de Havilland Beaver crashed into a mountainside near Quebec’s Lac Saint-Jean in good weather, according to crash investigators. The passengers included four British nationals and one woman from France. A […]

In my March Aftermath column on the 2012 crash of a Pilatus PC-12 in Florida, I faulted the National Transportation Safety Board for mixing up indicated and true airspeeds. Actually, it was I who misread the report. I am indebted to reader Timothy Burtch, an accident investigator with the NTSB, for pointing out that the […]

Two airplanes carrying as many as 40 parachutists collided over Slovakia today, raining down debris over a forested area as the occupants jumped for their lives. At least seven were killed in the collision while another 15 parachutists remain missing. The rest reportedly jumped from the airplanes during and after the collision. The Czech-built L-410 […]

South African airshow pilot Nigel Hopkins, who is in France getting prepared for the 28th FAI World Aerobatic Championships, is fortunate to be alive after his MX Aircraft MX2 airplane broke up in flight. Hopkins was on a practice flight in preparation for the competition, which is set to take place August 20 through 29 […]

A tragic accident happened on Sunday morning as a result of a midair collision northeast of Brown Field Municipal Airport located in the suburb of Otay Mesa 13 miles southeast of San Diego, California. Five people were killed when the two airplanes, which were both approaching the airport to land, plummeted to the ground in […]

Rescue workers in Indonesia have reached the crash site of an ATR-42 twin turboprop that went down in a mountainous area with 54 people on board, a senior government official told reporters. The teams on the ground have so far found at least 38 bodies at the scene and haven’t found any survivors, according to […]