Pilot Proficiency

Rescue workers in Indonesia have reached the crash site of an ATR-42 twin turboprop that went down in a mountainous area with 54 people on board, a senior government official told reporters. The teams on the ground have so far found at least 38 bodies at the scene and haven’t found any survivors, according to […]

The Coast Guard has suspended its search for the pilot of a Lancair Evolution that went down in the Pacific Ocean 460 miles off the California coast Thursday night. Coast Guard aircraft and ships searched for the crash site for five hours on Friday, reporting spotting aircraft debris but no signs of the pilot. They […]

A landing Ryan ST-3KR collided with a lawn mower Thursday morning, killing a 75-year-old man who was mowing the grass runway at Frazier Lake Airpark in Hollister, California. The WWII taildragger, traveling from Monte Sereno, California, had already touched down when it struck the lawn mower on the landing strip. The FAA and NTSB are […]

Some pilots aren’t totally sure of the differences between a spin and a spiral dive. That’s OK in the classroom setting when discussing aerodynamic theory, but it can be dangerous in the cockpit should either flight condition be allowed to develop and the pilot doesn’t immediately know what’s going on or the corrective actions to […]

The National Transportation Safety Board released aviation accident statistics for 2014 showing a slight increase in fatal general aviation accidents, which rose from 222 in 2013 to 253 in 2014. The overall number of GA accidents dropped slightly from 1,224 in 2013 to 1,221 in 2014, but the accident rate increased from 6.26 per 100,000 […]

A traffic conflict with a microlight is being considered as a factor in an unstable approach flown by the pilot of an Embraer Phenom 300 that overran the runway at Blackbushe Airport outside London last week, crashing in a fireball and killing the 11,000-hour pilot and three members of Osama Bin Laden’s family. UK accident […]

Just Aircraft, maker of the SuperSTOL bush plane that crashed last week in South Carolina with company co-founder Troy Woodland at the controls, issued a statement blaming the mishap on water contamination in the fuel. The company also heaped praise on the airplane’s steel tube cage for allowing Woodland and a passenger to escape the […]

The National Transportation Safety Board released its final report from the investigation of Harrison Ford’s plane crash on a golf course just west of Santa Monica Airport in southern California on March 5. Ford was climbing out from Runway 21 in his open cockpit Ryan ST-3KR, also known as a PT-22 Recruit, when he reported […]

The passengers of a Delta Air Lines Airbus A320 got the fright of their lives on Friday on their way from Boston to Salt Lake City when the pilots of the airliner flew into a storm with extreme hail but subsequently managed to make an improvised emergency landing in Denver. The airplane suffered major structural […]

Grumble, grumble. It was a bad morning around the breakfast table at the Hilton near Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. There were three crews altogether. Two of us pilots were billeted at the nearby Holiday Inn, definitely not to be confused with a ­Ritz-Carlton, and we’d driven over to join the others. It was a […]