This week, a 25-year old pilot was fined £3,400 for airspace infringement. The case was somewhat dramatically reported on in the Herts and Essex observer: Pilot fined after causing havoc over Stansted airport | Uttlesford village headlines The Court Reporter has written up the case, including the claim that, “At one point, Marriott’s poorly-equipped Piper…
Read more… 26 Apr 13
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has announced that a pilot sending and receiving text messages was a self-induced distraction and considered a contributing factor in the crash. From the accident report: On August 26, 2011, at 1841 central daylight time (all times cdt), a Eurocopter AS-350-B2 helicopter, N352LN, sustained substantial damage when it impacted…
Read more… 12 Apr 13
The AAIB has released a special bulletin regarding their field investigation of the helicopter which crashed into a crane at St George Wharf, Vauxhall, London on the 16th of January. The accident killed the pilot and a pedestrian. Additional people on the ground suffered serious injuries. The special bulletin does not include any analysis. They’ve…
Read more… 1 Mar 13
Crossair Flight 3597 was an AVRO 146-RJ100, a regional airliner manufactured in the UK by British Aerospace. This aircraft type is popular at small, city-based airports because it is very quiet. Flight 3597 was a scheduled flight from Berlin-Tegel in Germany to Zurich in Switzerland. On the 24th of November in 2001, 28 passengers, 3…
Read more… 22 Feb 13
Forty years ago on the 29th of December in 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 crashed into the Florida Everglades. It was an uneventful flight from JFK until shortly before they were at the approach at Miami Airport. When the flight-crew lowered the landing gear, they did not receive confirmation that the nose wheel was…
Read more… 4 Jan 13
The two pilots were co-owners of VH-CNZ. She was a commercial pilot with over 10,000 hours, 600 of them on type. One blog post at the time said that she was a flight instructor. He was a private pilot with just over 2,500 hours and 120 on type. VH-CNZ was a Piper Twin Comanche which…
Read more… 16 Nov 12
Air Midwest, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, was originally certified as an air carrier by the FAA in 1965. The airline originally consisted of a single Cessna 206, which transported human…
We have explored the aircraft registered as PK-LQP in quite some detail, looking at the sequence of events leading up to the crash of Lion Air flight 610. The Maintenance…
When I was learning to fly, I remember someone in the pilots’ bar insisting that all that talk about life jackets under your seat was a waste of time; if…
This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…
I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…
The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…
When the Kantonspolizei Zürich (the police department of the Swiss canton of Zurich) posted a photograph on Facebook showing the contents of a standard patrol car, they had no idea…
I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…