Accidents

The National Transportation Safety Board has concluded its investigation into the fatal accident involving Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. The space ship disintegrated during a test flight on October 31, 2014, resulting in the death of copilot Michael Alsbury. The NTSB concluded that Scaled Composites, the contractor for the program, failed to “consider and protect against the […]

A Mooney M20J with two aboard, flown by a 300-hour private pilot, began its takeoff roll on Runway 19 at Kansas City Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport (MKC) at intersection Kilo, with 5,313 feet of runway remaining. The pilot retracted the landing gear immediately after liftoff and began a climb, whereupon the engine lost power. […]

A Piper Malibu with five aboard crashed next to the runway at Wittman Regional Airport at around 8 o’clock local time this morning, sending up a plume of black smoke and closing the airspace over Oshkosh for about three hours. Four of those on board were able to get out of the airplane on their […]

Some surprising findings are highlighted in the National Transportation Safety Board accident report detailing what went horribly wrong in the skies over Afghanistan in May 2013, when a National Airlines Boeing 747 cargo plane climbing out after takeoff suddenly rolled over and plummeted into the ground, sending up a massive fireball. The dramatic accident was […]

Tuesday’s deadly midair collision of an F-16 and Cessna 150 in South Carolina was the first in the United States between a military and civilian airplane in a decade, highlighting how rare such tragedies are while also pointing to the need to remain especially vigilant when airplanes of vastly different performance capabilities mix in the […]

An Air Force F-16 fighter jet and a Cessna 150 collided over South Carolina this morning, scattering debris from the airplanes over a wide area. The collision occurred about 11 miles north of Charleston near the uncontrolled Moncks Corner Airport in the vicinity of a number of military jet routes. The F-16 pilot safely ejected. […]

An Indonesian air force C-130 transport plane carrying military personnel crashed into a residential neighborhood in the country’s third-largest city of Medan shortly after takeoff on Tuesday, killing all aboard the airplane and scores more on the ground. An Indonesian air force spokesman told reporters the death toll in the crash was confirmed as 74 […]

National Transportation Safety Board investigators have arrived on site in a remote, mountainous part southeast Alaska to begin trying to determine what caused the crash of a sightseeing floatplane that killed eight cruise ship passengers and the pilot last Thursday. The de Havilland DHC-3 Otter turboprop single crashed in rugged terrain about 80 miles from […]

The final harrowing moments of a deadly midair collision were captured on video on Sunday after a Cessna 185 floatplane collided with a Cessna 172 in Alberta, Canada. The pilot of the stricken 185 made an emergency landing at the airport in Fort McMurray, flipping over after touching down in the damaged plane. Two occupants […]

Five survivors were plucked from the waters off Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas, late last night after ditching in a Cessna 172 and clambering into a life raft as the sun was going down. The group floated in the water for three hours about nine miles southeast of Nassau before finally being located at […]