aircraft accident Posts

Oct. 1, 2025

Improving Ground Safety, while Cutting Costs: Practical Innovations for Airports and FBOs

An airport’s airside, where multi-million dollar aircraft park, is an unpredictable and potentially hazardous workspace for employees with a variety of jobs, regardless of the weather conditions.  Approximately 27,000 ramp accidents occur each year,…
Aug. 6, 2025

Flying Demands Keeping Your Head in the Game

Pilots get rusty when they don’t fly often. No matter whether they hold a private pilot certificate or an ATP. Even a professional pilot with thousands of hours in their logbook can easily find themselves behind the power curve in an airplane. Stayi…
Dec. 30, 2024

The Recent Airline Crashes in South Korea and Azerbaijan

While wandering around online the other day, I ran across Jenny Beatty’s post, which offered practical advice following the Azerbaijan Airlines E-190 and a Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 airline crashes. The guidelines are simple but are well worth …
Sept. 1, 2024

Confessions of a New Corporate Pilot

In the Citation III Confessions of a New Corporate Pilot Life would be sweet, I thought, now that I’d successfully passed my Cessna Citation III (CE-650) type rating check ride (this was a few years back). It meant I’d be flying my first…
Aug. 9, 2024

Making the Brazilian ATR-72 Spin

Note: This story was corrected on August 10th at 10:23 am, thanks to the help of a sharp-eyed reader. Making an ATR-72 Spin I wasn’t in Brazil on Friday afternoon, but I saw the post on Twitter or X (or whatever you call it) showing a Brazil …
July 1, 2024

Flight Planning Demands a Dose of Common Sense

Decades ago, when I learned to fly, it was well-known that a commercial co-pilot/first officer was allowed to occupy the right seat of a transport airplane only if they’d proven themselves subservient enough to understand that the guy in the l…
Feb. 7, 2024

Lessons Learned from an Industry Bankruptcy

It’s about trust I remember riding our crew bus with a bunch of other pilots, and flight attendants in the spring of 1991 not long after our employer Midway Airlines had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The old red and white school …
Feb. 4, 2024

Aviation Safety Semantics

As a word merchant and an aviator, words are important. They are the foundation of communication, and in many instances they can be the difference between life and death. “Hold Short” is but one example. Equally important is our semantic…
Jan. 5, 2024

What if the Haneda Crash Had Occurred in the US?

I saw the videos of the raging firestorm engulfing the A-350 on a runway before I heard any of the audio on Tuesday,  so I assumed the accident had occurred here in America. From the pictures alone, the loss of life should have been mind-numbing. Co…
Sept. 18, 2023

Defining Aviation Learning Experiences

To maintain my social skills, on Fridays I hike the Wiouwash Trail for 2.46 miles from the trailhead just east of Winneconne to the Bare Bones Brewery, which is trailside where the former interurban railbed enters Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on its northwes…
June 12, 2023

What’s New, Wildlife Strike Reporting?

For reasons unexplained, when perusing the FAA website to see what might be new and/or interesting in advisory circular land, discovering a draft AC 150/5200, Reporting Wildlife Aircraft Strikes, triggered my mental recording of Tom Jones singing &#…
Dec. 26, 2022

Every Flight Resolution: Look Out the Window

Here’s hoping you had a happy Christmas, and that Mother Nature’s preparatory frosty whiteout didn’t deprive you the company of traveling to family and friends. With them on their way home, and the Christmas clutter cleared away, c…
Oct. 3, 2022

Aeronautical Decision Making: Hurricane Edition

It seems a safe assumption that the only people who have not yet seen the spectrum of aviation damage wrought by Hurricane Ian are those have endured its torments and await reconnection to their electrical and data grids. The rest of us have witness…
Aug. 15, 2021

Launchpad, What Were You Thinking?

My close friends know that as a pilot I have one deep-seated fear. If I should ever buy it in an airplane, I don’t want it to be for something that’s classically not me, something I’ve spent my career as a flight instructor campaig…