Accidents

Many years ago the author Richard Bach, then writing for Flying, proposed that the solution for a pilot who had flown into a box canyon and could not turn between its walls was to pull up into a vertical climb, perform a stall turn and recover going in the other direction. Pilots who had never […]

A Colorado couple, both pilots with 2,000 hours and instrument ratings, had taken their Malibu to Hutchinson, Kansas, for its annual inspection. They returned home to Steamboat Springs in a rented car, and two weeks later drove back to Hutchinson to retrieve the airplane. The work done had included the removal of free play from […]

The 68-year-old, 600-hour pilot of a Lancair ES — a 310 hp four-seat composite kitplane that he himself had built — had had an instrument rating for almost seven years. Though he had logged 176 hours of simulated instrument time, however, he had spent only four hours in actual instrument conditions. On an August morning […]

A Cessna 337 Skymaster, a centerline-thrust piston twin, crashed on the grounds of New Jersey’s Monmouth Executive Regional Airport (BLM) on Monday afternoon in good weather. All five on board were killed, including three adults, a teenager and a younger boy. The flight originated at the airport about seven minutes before the crash, and some […]

On March 4, 2008, a Citation 500 with five people aboard took off from Wiley Post Airport in Oklahoma City. Two minutes later, it lay a smoking wreckage in a wooded area four miles away. Many witnesses saw the crash. One reported hearing what “sounded like an engine compressor stall” — that is, a loud […]

It was 4 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in March, a beautiful, clear, early spring day. A Cirrus SR22 was approaching the private airport of Aero Plantation, a fly-in community southeast of Charlotte, North Carolina. The 2,400-foot runway is 06/24; its elevation is 624 feet msl. At the nearest reporting facility, Monroe, seven miles to […]

At about 8:25 A.M. on Sept. 3, 2007, Steve Fossett took off from a friend’s ranch, about 60 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada, in a borrowed 1980 Bellanca Super Decathlon. A few minutes later, about nine miles south of the airstrip, an employee of the ranch who knew the airplane well saw the Decathlon fly […]

It was one of those fine, late-fall, California desert nights: velvety-black, moonless and calm. The 182 took off from the North Las Vegas Airport bound for Rosamond, California, which is in the Mojave Desert about 70 miles north of Los Angeles. The pilots aboard, two ATPs who had logged between them 53,000 hours in military […]

On January 9, 2007, the pilot of a Cessna 207 prepared for a cargo flight from Kenai, Alaska, south of Anchorage, to Kokhanok, 127 nm miles to the southwest. It was around 10 in the morning-but the winter sun was still below the horizon — when he started the engine, which had been warmed during […]

It was the middle of a short December day when a call came to a helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) firm in Soldotna, Alaska, requesting transport for a patient to Anchorage from a clinic in Cordova. Soldotna is south and west of Anchorage; Cordova is 127 nm east. The helicopter would first have to position […]