Accidents

Pilot Rob Weber of Fort Myers, Florida, says he always wondered what it would be like to have a bird strike take out the windshield of his airplane. Now he knows. And he got it on video. Weber was piloting his Piper Saratoga last week when a direct hit by a bird shattered the left […]

The businessman-pilot took off at 3:15 in the afternoon from St. Petersburg, Florida, in his company’s A36 Bonanza, bound for Norman, Oklahoma. He filed IFR, with a cruising altitude of 10,000 feet and a speed of 185 knots. The 900 nm trip would have been at the very limit of the airplane’s range, but he […]

A Rockwell 690C Commander on its second approach to Nashville’s John C. Tune Airport early Monday evening crashed next to a packed YMCA, killing all four people on board. Nobody on the ground was hurt. The Aero Commander, N840V, had departed Great Bend Municipal Airport in Kansas for the planned 2 hour, 15 minute flight, […]

A Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) instructor pilot and student now have an uneven number of takeoffs and landings in their logbooks. Both qualified for membership in the Caterpillar Club by ejecting from their Beechcraft CT-156 Harvard II trainer during a routine training mission. The Harvard II is the Canadian version of the Texan II […]

The mysterious early morning crash of a Cessna 172 on October 29 just became a little less mysterious. Canadian pilot Michael Callan’s blood alcohol level (BAC) has been reported by the Tennessee state medical examiner as 0.081 percent — more than twice the FAA limit of 0.040 percent and just in excess of Tennessee’s threshold […]

Dramatic security video from five infrared cameras at Aspen-Pitkin County Airport in Colorado captured the January 5 crash of a Challenger 601 that killed a pilot and critically injured two others. The video, posted online by Aspen Journalism, a local non-profit media outlet, shows the airplane on its second landing attempt after aborting the first […]

It was an old story. A relatively inexperienced pilot practicing landings got too slow on final approach, stalled and crashed. The pilot, 56, was flying a club Cherokee 180, a type in which he had logged 13 of his 130 hours. He was making a short round-robin cross-country flight, ostensibly for practice, with landings at […]

A U.S. Navy F/A-18E crashed about 45 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach on Wednesday during a routine training mission. The pilot ejected before the Super Hornet went down and is in critical condition after being rescued by a fishing vessel, according to a statement by the Navy. He had deployed his life raft […]

A variety of factors contributed to the tragic crash of a Twin Commander into an Arizona mountain that killed a father and his three young children just before Thanksgiving two years ago. Linking them all, however, was a culture of “complacency” that existed among the co-owners of the company that operated the airplane, according to […]

If you’ve ever wondered just how violent a bird strike really is, check out this harrowing cockpit video shot from the inside of a Cessna 210 a few weeks ago. The two men shown in the footage took off from Brookeridge Airpark in Downers Grove, Illinois, on December 28 and struck a Canadian goose just […]