Accidents

All three men aboard a Cirrus SR22 died last Wednesday when the airplane crashed while attempting to land at Melbourne International Airport after a controller instructed the pilot to “cut it in tight” to avoid other traffic. ATC audio recordings show a busy traffic pattern at the time of the crash, as well as some […]

Word came at 9:55 P.M. to the Chinle, Arizona, office of an air ambulance service that a patient needed transport from Alamosa, Colorado, 192 nm to the east-northeast. Forty minutes later, a King Air C90 with a pilot, a paramedic and a nurse aboard was airborne. It never arrived. The airplane struck a ridge 37 […]

Before you click on this video of an event that was captured back in the 1960s of a hand-propped airplane going out of control on the ramp, realize that nobody got killed and no limbs were lopped off. But it is still terrifying to watch. When it picks up after the FAA’s opening speech about […]

A United Express Embraer 170 made an emergency landing at Newark Liberty International Airport on Monday evening after the airplane’s nose gear failed to deploy, closing the busy New York-area airport for about 30 minutes as emergency crews dealt with the incident. Passengers and crew aboard the flight evacuated safely on the airplane’s emergency slides. […]

Remember the old joke about helicopters being a loose collection of parts flying in formation? Well here’s an example of a helicopter on the ground whose loose collection of parts suddenly decided to become a lot looser. The self-imposed destruction of this Helibras-built AS350 AStar happened in Brazil on Feb. 23. Ground resonance is thought […]

Remember that runway overrun by an F-16C at Oshkosh last summer (see it on video here)? Plenty of armchair pilots speculated about why it might have happened, with possible causes centering on what many presumed was a brake problem or perhaps too high an airspeed on final. It turns out that not a single one […]

Seven Marines were killed Wednesday night when an AH-1 Super Cobra and a UH-1Y Huey collided midair during a routine training exercise at the Marine Corps Air Station Yuma in Arizona. According to the Marine Corps, the collision occurred in a remote training region west of the Chocolate Mountains in California. The crash occurred around […]

(March 2012) Slipping gradually toward an accident is very common, but it is not the only way accidents happen. At the opposite end of the spectrum lie accidents in which a pilot who has always flown in a safe and professional manner makes one critical mistake. One area in which this type of accident is […]

A Beechcraft Bonanza and a Robinson R22 collided in midair near Rio Vista Airport on Sunday night, but both pilots managed to land the aircraft without sustaining serious injuries. The R22 pilot, a 29-year-old commercial pilot who was working on accumulating night hours for her helicopter rating at the time, said she saw the Bonanza […]

The NTSB has released a preliminary report on the Lancair IV-P crash that killed the CEO of Micron Technology Steve Appleton earlier this month, although the initial review leaves many questions about the fatal accident unanswered. According to the NTSB, witnesses saw the homebuilt attempt to take off from Runway 10R at Gowen Field in […]