Accidents

Two pilots left South Jersey Regional Airport in a Piper Arrow at about five o’clock on an April afternoon for some instrument flying practice. The left seat pilot, with 334 hours, had single engine land and sea and instrument ratings; she had logged 100 hours of simulated and nine hours of actual instrument time, as […]

On a cloudless morning in April of this year, a C-5B transport of the 436th Airlift Wing took off from Dover AFB in Delaware, bound for Ramstein Air Base in Germany on a routine supply mission. The C-5 is the United States Air Force’s largest transport; this one’s takeoff weight was 742,000 pounds, including a […]

In the spring of 2002 a Beech D-45, the civilianized version of the Bonanza-derived T-34 Mentor military trainer, crashed while attempting a landing in gusty conditions at Minden, Louisiana. Both occupants of the tandem two-seat airplane were killed. The Mentor’s owner, a private pilot, had flown over 1,000 hours in it since acquiring it in […]

In December 2000 a tower controller in southern Florida received a single radio transmission: “Mayday mayday mayday Pitts 260DB in an unrecoverable flat spin at 3,500 feet.” The airplane crashed in the Everglades, coming to rest partially inverted and nearly vertical in several feet of water. The canopy, which had been jettisoned in flight, was […]

In May 1999, in Plattsmouth, Nebraska, a two-seat homebuilt GP-4 crashed shortly after takeoff, killing its 73-year-old builder and 60-year-old passenger. Both men were licensed pilots. The builder had logged 181.4 hours in the airplane since first flying it 15 months earlier. The weather at the time of the accident was clear and mild. According […]

In April, 2003, a Beech B200 King Air on approach to Fitchburg, Massachusetts, crashed about a mile from the airport. It had made a normal approach before overflying the runway, making a couple of steep turns and then diving into a single-story industrial building, penetrating the wall just below the roof. Of the King Air’s […]

The November 2001 crash, shortly after takeoff from JFK, of American Airlines Flight 587 sent a tremor through the aviation community. It involved an extremely rare event: the structural failure, and complete separation, of one of the major flying surfaces-namely, the vertical stabilizer-of the airplane, an Airbus A300-600. In the ensuing loss of control, the […]

As homebuilt airplanes become more and more numerous, they naturally figure more prominently in the accident statistics. As you might expect, they are more prone to accidents arising from design or construction errors than certified airplanes are. A look at their fatal accidents for a single month-July, 2001-reveals this pattern and others as well. The […]

In the past 10 years, the National Transportation Safety Board has used the phrase “inadequate preflight inspection” in the probable causes of 15 fatal accidents. The most common direct cause is fuel contamination, usually with water, which typically leads to power loss after takeoff and a subsequent stall-spin. Other oversights include improperly latched baggage doors; […]

On the morning of a late fall day in 2000, a Utah rancher took up two passengers in his Cessna 175 to search for stray cattle. It was part of the fall roundup, an “annual event looked upon with anticipation by many.” After spotting a few head, they flew toward a bluff where several cowboys […]