Accidents

A P-51 Mustang crashed shortly after takeoff from the Durango-La Plata County Airport in Colorado on July 4, killing the two pilots on board. The Mustang’s owner, John Earley, was reportedly receiving flight instruction from Michael Schlarb when the rare airplane went down just outside the airport perimeter fence. According to eyewitnesses, the 1944 P-51D […]

The pilot in the left seat of the Piper Arrow was a 33,000-hour ATP; his right-seat companion had a private ticket and less than 200 hours. The two took off from Racine, Wisconsin, on a midsummer afternoon and headed northward, just off the western shore of Lake Michigan. There were scattered clouds at 3,400 feet […]

A passenger was killed and the captain nearly struck by a bullet on Tuesday night as gunmen opened fire on an airliner landing at the main airport in Peshawar, Pakistan. According to news reports, a female passenger sitting next to her daughter died in the attack and two flight attendants were injured when at least […]

A collision between a Learjet and a German Eurofighter occurred yesterday near the town of Olberg in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The devastating event resulted in the Learjet crashing and apparently killing the two people aboard, according to the Aviation Safety Network. Parts of the Learjet were strewn over a large area, with […]

The National Transportation Safety Board released its final conclusions about what caused the crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in San Francisco last July, blaming the pilots for making a series of critical missteps related to the Boeing 777’s automated systems. At a hearing in Washington, D.C., this morning, the NTSB highlighted one mistake in […]

A 21-year-old pilot who works for a skydiving company was forced to make a skydiving jump of his own — his first ever — to bail out of his Cessna 182 after a previous jumper damaged the aircraft in flight. Southern Illinois University student Shawn Kinmartin was flying south of St. Louis at 11,500 feet […]

Richard Rockefeller, the nephew of former vice president and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, died on Friday morning when he crashed in his Piper Meridian in poor weather soon after takeoff from Westchester County Airport outside New York City. Rockefeller, 65, had flown his PA-46 from his home in Maine to celebrate his father David […]

Accident investigators are focusing on two perplexing clues as they try to determine what caused the deadly crash of Gulfstream IV in Bedford, Massachusetts, on May 31 after the jet failed to lift off from the runway during what should have been a routine takeoff. The first mystery concerns the GIV’s flaps. Investigators found the […]

Two separate airplane crashes in Central Florida, one in Daytona Beach and one in Merritt Island, claimed the lives of four people Monday night. In Daytona a student and an instructor died in a fiery crash shortly after takeoff from Daytona Beach International. Witnesses say the Cessna 172 they were flying appeared to lose engine […]

Cockpit voice and flight data recorder information recovered in the wreckage of a deadly Gulfstream IV crash at Hanscom Field outside Boston on May 31 reveals the crew experienced some type of control problem at very high speed late in the takeoff roll. All seemed normal to the GIV pilots as they advanced the power […]