Yesterday, a federal grand jury indicted Boeing’s former Chief Technical Pilot for fraud, specifically accusing him of deceiving the FAA’s Aircraft Evaluation Group during their evaluation and certification of the 737 MAX and of scheming to defraud Boeing’s US-based airline customers to obtain “tens of millions of dollars” for Boeing. “Forkner allegedly abused his position…
Read more… 15 Oct 21
On the 3rd of October 2021, a Pilatus PC-12 registration YR-PDV crashed shortly after taking off from Milan Linate Airport. The Pilatus PC-12 is a single-engine turboprop designed and manufactured by Pilatus Aircraft in Switzerland. It is a popular aircraft for corporate transport (bizprop?) and short regional flights. In this instance, it was a private…
Read more… 8 Oct 21
Last week, we started the sequence of events that happened inside the cockpit of Lion Air flight 610. The primary resource for this sequence of events is the final report released by the Komite Nasional Keselamatan Transportasi (KNKT). We left off with the cockpit still blaring with alarms and alerts. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System…
Read more… 1 Oct 21
On the 29th of October 2018, Lion Air flight 610, a Boeing 737-8 (MAX) crashed at Tanjung Karawang, West Java after departing from Jakarta. This crash was the first public sign that there was something wrong with the Boeing 737-MAX; the initial domino in a cascading sequence of events that uncovered an unbelievable quagmire of…
Read more… 24 Sep 21
This article by Key Dismukes, Grant Young and Robert Sumwait is based on their research at NASA to study the problem of crew preoccupation. They reviewed NTSB reports of accidents attributed to crew error and concluded that nearly half of them involved lapses of attention associated with interruptions, distractions, or preoccupation with one task to…
Read more… 17 Sep 21
On Tuesday the 13th of August 2019, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, registration N84287 crashed into a sand bar on the Escambia River near Jay, Florida, near the Alabama border. The pilot held both commercial pilot and flight instructor certificates with over 1,000 hours flight time, 798 hours in the aircraft make and model. The aircraft…
Read more… 10 Sep 21
On the 19th of February 2023, a private pilot arranged to meet with a flight instructor at Birr Airfield to fly a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. That morning, the flight instructor…
On the 9th of August 2024 at 16:22, Voepass flight 2283, a scheduled flight from Cascavel, Paraná, to Guarulhos, São Paulo entered a flat spin and crashed into a residential…
There are a number of reasons why you might need to quickly point out the differences between a General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and a Eurofighter EF2000 Typhoon. You might…
A few days ago (21st of May 2024), Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 encountered heavy turbulence on a passenger flight from London-Heathrow to Singapore. There were 229 on board, including eighteen…
This video of a mid-air wheel exchange goes viral once a year or so, but I never get tired of watching it. Last week, it showed up on Reddit and…
This week, we have a guest post by J.B. Rivard who wrote an article for the American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS) and used one of my articles as a reference.…
Mistakes were made. All of them were mine. Before I left for Dresden, I planned out my full itinerary. Berlin is a much busier airport than Tallinn, so I needed…
I’m in Dresden at the moment and I’m afraid I haven’t had a free moment to write you a new article. Luckily, lots of other people are on the internet…