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Late last week the National Transportation Safety Board put out a "safety recommendation" letter about preventing accidents in the "VFR Flyway" above the Hudson River. For previous items on the August 8 airplane-helicopter collision that killed nine people, see here , here , here...
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Concerning Saturday's front-page story in the NYT about what the Teterboro air traffic controllers were doing just before the airplane-helicopter collision over the Hudson: Obviously this doesn't look good for the controllers (that one of them was on a "non-business-related phone call"...
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Concerning Saturday's front-page story in the NYT about what the Teterboro air traffic controllers were doing just before the airplane-helicopter collision over the Hudson: Obviously this doesn't look good for the controllers (that one of them was on a "non-business-related phone call"...
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Why this crash happened, in a "who was thinking what" sense, may not be known for a long time if ever. But the mechanical description of the crash sequence now seems clearer. The NYT has another of its useful aviation disaster graphics attached to this story . The graphic itself is a pop-up...
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As with any airplane accident or disaster, it can take a while to know what really happened. That is certainly the case with the apparent collision a few hours ago between a small airplane and a helicopter off lower Manhattan. What follows is just some orienting info to put in context today's unfolding...
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Yesterday I mentioned one informed hypothesis about the accident-chain that brought Air France 447 down into the Atlantic Ocean: pitot-tube trouble, leading to autopilot trouble, leading to manual control of the airplane, leading (perhaps) to overstressing of the plane's tail structure during severe...
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This recent post and preceding items mention the still-ambiguous mix of data concerning the crash of Air France 447 into the Atlantic six weeks ago. The plane's presence in a tropical thunderstorm was almost certainly the trigger for the problems. And what happened then? From a reader involved in...
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Yesterday I mentioned that (unsurprisingly) there was not yet any definitive word on the cause of the Air France flight 447 crash over the Atlantic off Brazil. It turns out that there has been this recent interim report from the French BEA, Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses , about the basic facts...
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Unless I've missed it in my time away from the internets, no one yet knows exactly what happened to Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean six weeks ago. But whatever went wrong, the problems were almost certainly related to the plane's having flown into the middle of a powerful thunderstorm...
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Regarding one of the puzzles of the Air France 447 crash -- how a professional air crew ended up in the middle of a powerful thunderstorm -- an airline pilot writes: As a point of reference I'm an A-320 Captain for NWA (soon to be Delta but happy to be getting a paycheck) with over 12,000 hours....
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I have been preoccupied, or out of range, in the week since this disaster occurred and so hadn't read up on it. But here, for anyone who doesn't know about it, is a source that establishes beyond question one crucial point about the accident, and points to informed discussions of the many other...
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I recognize that it is both heartbreaking and potentially cruel to keep going into details of what exactly led to the commuter-plane crash in February that killed all 49 people aboard the airplane and one person on the ground. (Previously here .) But this story in The Buffalo News, based on the previous...
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About the public hearings on the terrible crash in Buffalo three months ago, in which 50 people died: - Authoritative wrapup of the situation here by Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal, who has had well-informed stories on this topic from the beginning. - This more-complete information supports...
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The causes of this crash seem more mysterious with the passage of a day. For the record, the human aspects have been clarified . The airplane was owned by a prominent dentist and businessman from Redlands, California. Nine of the people killed were his family members: two daughters, their husbands, and...
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Let me start with the same caution as in yesterday's item about this sad incident: it can take months or years to get the full explanation of an airplane crash, sometimes the real answer is never known, and any hypotheses now are tentative. So my purpose yesterday was not to say definitively what...