Accidents

During 18 months in 2003 and 2004, SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites’ original air-launched spaceplane, made 14 free flights of which six were powered, the rest glides. Although SS1 was a novel design with an untried type of motor and was venturing into inhospitable territory last visited by the X-15 almost 50 years earlier, the privately funded […]

An Air Canada Airbus A320 touched down about 1,100 feet short of the runway at Halifax International Airport while attempting to land in heavy snow early Sunday, injuring 25 passengers and crew when the jetliner’s landing gear tore off. Photos of the crash scene show the wrecked airliner with its nose cone missing and engines […]

Airlines and aviation safety regulators around the world are considering a range of measures intended to prevent another tragedy like the one witnessed in the French Alps last week when a packed Germanwings jetliner crashed with its copilot at the controls. German prosecutors say the 28-year-old pilot Andreas Lubitz apparently crashed the Airbus A320 intentionally […]

The pilot, 58, was a hotel owner in the northwest England town of Chester. Although he did not fly professionally, he held commercial licenses for both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. In 2002 he had replaced his first airplane, a 160 hp fixed-gear Socata Tampico, with a 1970 Cessna 310, which he flew for 300 hours […]

Many questions still remain about Tuesday’s horrifying crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 into the French Alps, but the lead prosecutor handling the investigation said today new information suggests the A320’s copilot locked the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately initiated the fateful descent. Still unclear, however, is what specific information investigators have uncovered to […]

Imagine scrambling across the ceiling of your Airbus A330’s cockpit during a terrifying negative-G dive to reach your pilot seat and avert disaster in the nick of time. That’s just what happened after the captain of a UK military transport plane nearly caused a crash when his personal digital SLR camera became wedged between the […]

Investigators have begun the painstaking process of trying to determine why an Airbus A320 carrying 144 passengers and six crew members on a scheduled flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf suddenly started descending over the south of France before crashing in the French Alps. The French civil aviation authority confirmed there was no distress call from […]

An emergency landing nearly ended in tragedy last week when an airplane was forced down on a ski slope in the French ski resort Avoriaz, the French news outlet Agence France-Presse reports. During the forced landing, the airplane managed to avoid most of the people on the busy ski hill but hit a Polish skier […]

Dramatic video captured the collision of a pair of Indonesian military trainers as the pilots practiced their routine for an airshow in Malaysia on Sunday. The pilots of both airplanes safely ejected after clipping each other during a head-on pass that led to the fiery crashes of the KT-1B turboprops, single-engine training airplanes built by […]

A UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter assigned to the Army National Guard in Hammond, Louisiana, crashed near Eglin Air Force Base, about 40 miles east of Pensacola, Florida, during a routine training mission on Tuesday evening. Seven marines and four crewmembers from the Marine Special Operations Regiment from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, were on board the helicopter […]