Safety

Handling emergencies and unusual situations is a significant part of learning to fly and remaining current to fly any airplane. Flight training can’t possibly teach pilots how to handle every single event they could encounter, however. With that concept in mind, pilots are often taught to look for the similarities between one event and another […]

“Today, I’m not only going to give you the problems, I’m going to give you the solutions.” When a pilot hears those words from an instructor before launching into a flight review—what can be a pedestrian exercise at best—that pilot knows this session will be different. Steve Thorne didn’t have to fly all the way […]

John Goglia and Gregory Feith, two well-known and outspoken aviation safety insiders, this week released episode three of their new podcast the “Flight Safety Detectives.” The show looks in depth at aircraft accidents, aircraft technology and the big business of aviation around the world. The hosts will also provide important “backstories” to the flying public […]

In response to what the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) considers to be “far too many preventable accidents involving Part 135 flight operations in Alaska,” the Board convened a Part 135 Flight Operations Roundtable on September 6, 2019, in Anchorage. Since 2008, the NTSB has investigated 182 accidents involving fixed-wing scheduled and non-scheduled Part 135 […]

The FAA’s Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) Program has over the past 11 years used an open exchange of operational data to continuously improve safety. The General Aviation Joint Steering committee, for example, uses operations data to identify risks, develop recommended risk mitigation measures and evaluate the effectiveness of implemented solutions. The NBAA […]

Over the past decade or so, the global aviation industry has come to realize that pointing the finger of blame at one of our own for a mistake does nothing to identify the real problem at hand. The only exception to ignoring the why behind an incident or accident is when a person is found […]

The FAA has partnered with Kittyhawk, a provider of the Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability (LAANC) UAS service, to redevelop the B4UFLY app, which helps operators of UAS stay out of trouble in terms of where they can and can’t fly. Kittyhawk has offered to modify the app at no cost to the FAA. […]

Each year the safety data for airline travel aboard commercial aircraft weighing more than 12,500 pounds just keeps getting better in the United States according to the International Air Transport Association. There hasn’t been a major U.S. airline accident in years. Worth noting is that last weekend’s AtlasAir Boeing 767 crash near Houston that claimed […]

Jean-Claude was in the left seat. He was senior to me, but I was flying. We were near the equator, where Mermoz and Guillaumet had once flown — but they, poor fellows, had not been at 35,000 feet! We entered the clouds at what looked like a soft spot in a squall line. At first […]

“That’s what notams are. They are just a bunch of garbage that nobody pays any attention to.” It would be a dramatic statement regardless of who said it. But this was Robert Sumwalt, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, speaking at a hearing. Sumwalt had reason to be upset. An Air Canada jetliner had […]