Air Canada regional flight 8646 operated by Jazz Aviation from Montreal to New York’s LaGuardia Airport on Sunday night, plowed into an airport fire truck that crossed the runway just ahead of the landing airplane. Pilots Antoine Forest, and MacKinzie Gunther, both of Canada were killed. Scores of passengers on the Bombardier CRJ-900 were injured along with the occupants of the fire truck. Video posted to Instagram by Simon Hradecky, publisher of the Aviation Herald, shows the moment of the collision.   View this post on Instagram   A post shared by SpeedbirdHD (@speedbirdhd) The fire truck was operated by the Port Authority of New… Read More…

The title of Caroline Paul’s new book poses a seemingly simple question: Why Fly? Her answer unfolds on many levels, like a particularly fetching landscape you’ll want to remember flying over. Why Fly is funny and geeky with a healthy, stealthy dose of little-known aviation facts. It is also a thought-provoking and beautifully written amble through Paul’s adventures in the sky. An intrepid outdoorswoman, firefighter, and author of eight books, Caroline Paul learned to fly in a Cessna 152 when she was 20 years old. She did not find the 24-foot 2-seat airplane satisfying. It felt too much like being in a “soup can” she… Read More…

Dean Kamen, the inventor best known for the creation of the Segway, is the latest wealthy entrepreneur/public figure to be outed for his relationship with serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Over the past few weeks, Kamen has stepped down from a board position with BETA, a Vermont aviation tech company and FIRST, a program he founded to promote STEM education for children, the latter move pending the outcome of a thorough investigation. This may appear to be a fast crisis response, but don’t be misled. No Congressional Epstein Files Transparency Act was needed to know that Kamen and Epstein went way back, and not because of… Read More…

For more than a decade, I’ve been writing about the aviators who populated the world of serial pedophile and power-broker Jeffrey Epstein. Now I know that the subject of one of my first articles notified Epstein that this aspect of his global influence network was on my radar. In an email to Epstein dated January 27, 2015, Nadia Marcinko, also known as Nada Marcincova, forwarded without comment the link to my blog, Global Girl & Friend of Sex Offender Jeffrey Epstein Same Person, Flight School Says. This was long before Epstein was the villain known ’round the world for procuring underage girls and/or hosting parties… Read More…

The National Transportation Safety Board charged that years of inaction by the government agency assigned to ensure safe flight led directly to the fatal collision of an airliner and a U.S. Army helicopter one year ago. “It was one hundred percent preventable,” Jennifer Homendy, the NTSB’s chief, said at the meeting on Tuesday to determine the probable causes of the crash. American Airlines Flight 5342 on a flight from Wichita to Washington, was struck from below by an ascending Army Blackhawk helicopter on a training flight. Both aircraft plunged into the icy Potomac River. What happened was not a mystery. But the baffling takeaway from… Read More…

New photos just released by the National Transportation Safety Board show the rapid and dramatic loss of an engine on UPS cargo plane in November, and provide important insight into factors contributing to the deadly crash. The series of six images, taken from an airport surveillance video shows the engine and the pylon attaching it to the left wing breaking away from the MD-11 widebody just as the airplane is rotating on takeoff from Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport. Fuel ignited on both the engine and wing tank. And in the 4th photo in the series, the engine flies over the fuselage. It was found… Read More…

UPDATE Dec 12, 2026 – The Federal Aviation Administration Monday issued a safety alert related to the problems encountered by airliners flying below SpaceX spacecraft in 2025 and reported by ProPublica last week. The link to the SAFO can be found at the end of the blog. It would be an understatement to say that aviation in the Americas has had a rocky start in 2026. The US arrest and extraction of Venezuela’s president and first lady on January 3 shut down airspace across the Caribbean region and delayed hundreds of commercial flights. This was obvious to all and, given the circumstances, not surprising. That… Read More…

UPDATED FOLLOWING NTSB NEWS CONFERENCE and correcting the name of the board member on site. The plane that crashed in North Carolina on Thursday, killing retired NASCAR driver Greg Biffle and six others hit the ground before arriving at runway of Statesville Airport, where it was heading due to some yet unknown problem on board, National Transportation Safety Board member, Michael Graham told reporters at a briefing today. People magazine, quoting Cathy Grossu, the mother of Biffle’s wife Cristina, said she received a text from Cristine saying “We’re in trouble,” before the crash. Graham said the NTSB was not aware of that, nor did investigators… Read More…

The mid-air collision of American Airlines Flight 5342 with an Army helicopter that sent both aircraft into the chilly Potomac River in Washington, DC, in January, was as shocking as it was deadly. Video of the Sikorsky helicopter flying into the airliner and more footage of the unsuccessful attempts at finding survivors in the water brought global attention to a horrifying accident that killed 67 people. So it is highly disturbing to the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, that helicopter flight restrictions, put in place just days after the accident, would be rolled back under Defense Department funding legislation passed by the House… Read More…

NOTE TO READERS A previous version of this post contained several errors, which I attribute to working in haste and deeply regret. It has been replaced and updated with this one. Thank you to loyal readers who brought the mistakes to my attention. I promise to do better. A UPS airplane crashed while attempting to take off from Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport in Kentucky’s largest city on Tuesday evening. Several cameras documented the spectacle, the plane racing down the runway, a fire blooming from the left engine as the nose rotated up, followed less than 10 seconds later by a massive explosion that jetissoned… Read More…