Aviation Safety

Three men chartered a Beechcraft Bonanza for a late-night flight between Mason City (KMCW), Iowa, and Fargo (KFAR), North Dakota, about 200 nautical miles. The 21-year-old charter pilot’s initial review of the forecast that chilly February evening called for VFR weather with bases along the route at 5,000 feet and visibility of 10 miles. The only […]

GAPPRE is a mouthful even as an acronym. But the Flight Safety Foundation and its partner groups are hoping the Global Action Plan for the Prevention of Runway Excursions will help create solutions to one of the most serious accident risks to both large and small aircraft, as well as their occupants. The International Air […]

I recently selected 32 accident analyses, from the nearly 500 that I have written since I took over Flying’s Aftermath column in 1980, and assembled them into a book called Why? Thinking About Plane Crashes. It’s available from Amazon as a paperback or an e-book. I hope someone will buy it. I would pledge that […]

Inadvertent VFR flight into IMC weather and the resulting fatal accidents are not simply a problem for aircraft pilots, but also for those flying helicopters. In a news release, the US Helicopter Safety Team (USHST) said, “Between 2000 to 2019 in the US, there were 130 fatal accidents directly linked to the issue of spatial […]

The media team at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque, New Mexico, first reported the story of how a civilian air traffic controller—Wendy Smith—working in Kirtland Tower saved the six-person flight crew of an Air Force CV-22, and avoided a $90 million accident. Cassidy is a 12-year veteran controller at Kirtland. “They were taking off on a […]

A touch of inspiration keeps us going when difficult times surround us—so the advent of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association annual awards presented on February 3 via livestream felt like the push forward we all need. The General Aviation Awards honor select people in the industry who have made major contributions over the course […]

In December 2019, a Canadian-registry Piper Aerostar 602P with three aboard left Cabo San Lucas in Baja California, Mexico, to return home to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. The group stopped overnight at Chino, California, east of Los Angeles—perhaps to visit the aviation museum there—and continued the next day to Nanaimo with a […]

What a salesman! With one phone call, this Cessna 180 owner and regional director of the International 180/185 Club had sold me on joining the organization and speaking at their convention next year. And by now, you’ve probably gathered that “joining” and “speaking” are recessive genes in my DNA. But I was intrigued when Eric […]

The title of Ernest K. Gann’s memoir—”Fate Is the Hunter”—about his aviation career in the first half of the 20th century grabbed hold of me the first time I read the words. It’s an evocative phrase with many exertions, but they all point to the same conclusion: If you do something dangerous and you do […]

A new safety tool, the Dynamic Regulatory System, recently released online by the FAA, brings together documents and data from more than a dozen agency repositories. The DRS combines more than 65 document types—upwards of 2 million regulatory documents—into one searchable application, including all of the information found in the Flight Standards Information System (FSIMS) […]