America’s top transportation safety official, and a former 737 captain told U.S. senators on Wednesday what he might have done if he was in the cockpit of one of the Boeing 737 Maxs that inexplicably and repeatedly went nose down before crashing in Indonesia and Ethiopia. National Transportation Safety Board Chairman, Robert Sumwalt replied to that hypothetical question saying, “Well, I flew the 737 for 10 years, and I do believe there is a procedure on the Flintstone version of the 737 I flew, a very old 737, but I do believe the first thing I would do is oppose that motion by pulling the… Read More…

The Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday turned down a request that it take a look at the safety implications of the shrinking airline seat. In a letter to Paul Hudson from FlyersRights.org, the FAA said it had no reason to believe that smaller seats and larger travelers is an unsafe mix when it comes to emergency evacuations. Flyers Rights had claimed that large passengers would slow evacuations as they try to extricate themselves from the smallest of economy class seats in an emergency. But the FAA challenged the assumption. The time it takes for passengers to get out of their seats is less than the… Read More…

@Tesla This is what happened to my husband and his car today. No accident,out of the blue, in traffic on Santa Monica Blvd. Thank you to the kind couple who flagged him down and told him to pull over. And thank god my three little girls weren’t in the car with him pic.twitter.com/O4tPs5ftVo — Mary McCormack (@marycmccormack) June 16, 2018 A dramatic video of a Tesla Model S furiously burning by side of a road in Southern California, is yet another reason why U.S. government investigators are right to examine the effect of new technology on overall transportation safety. On Saturday, actress Mary McCormack, tweeted… Read More…

Say “dead puppy in the over head bin” or “comfort peacock” and I’m guessing most folks will know what you’re talking about.   A Google search finds nearly two million references to the event last month in which a dog suffocated after a flight attendant ordered its owners to put the crated puppy in the overhead bin. A stunning 16 million references litter the Google landscape related to the passenger who tried to board a United flight with a comfort peacock in tow. Without diminishing the trauma of the family of the pup, “Coquito” or the curiosity factor related to anyone choosing to fly with a… Read More…

At noon today, October 15th,  Samsung Note 7 phones will no longer be allowed on airplanes, the U.S. Department of Transportation has ruled. “The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 device is considered a forbidden hazardous material,” reads the press release issued by the DOT. Passengers carrying one will be denied boarding and those who try to evade the ban surreptitiously, “are increasing the risk of a catastrophic incident” and could be subject to prosecution. Samsung is still unable to identify what about its newest gadget is causing the batteries to go into thermal runaway, spewing flames and toxic smoke. But the Samsung mystery is prompting a few airlines… Read More…

Australia’s news program 60 Minutes told viewers on Sunday that the only possible explanation for the disappearance of Malaysia 370 is “that a skilled pilot deliberately landed the 777 on the water.” Headline-making to be sure, but it’s unlikely to have gone down the way the program suggests. The twenty minute report by correspondent Ross Coulthart, rejuvenates the pilot suicide theory with the help of Larry Vance, who was a senior investigator for the Canadian Transport Safety Board during the crash of Swissair 111 in 1998. The key to the MH370 mystery, according to Vance is in the flaperon, a flight control surface located at the back of the wing…. Read More…

As sure as July 17th will arrive each summer, families of the 230 people who died in the crash of TWA Flight 800 twenty years ago, will remember with sadness the night the Boeing 747 exploded off the coast of Long Island. Here’s something else they can count on, a pre-anniversary story from someone, promising to blow the lid off the conspiracy to hide the truth about what really happened to the airplane. But July 2016 is not just the 20th anniversary of the disaster it is also the month of the presidential nominating conventions and the newest book about TWA 800, The Crash, the Coverup and… Read More…

Were times simpler in the sixties, or was there something unique about Joseph Sutter that allowed him to do what airplane makers can’t seem to accomplish now? We can speculate but Sutter, one of the creative engineering minds behind the Boeing 747 gets the credit for taking what was then the world’s largest passenger jet from concept to flight in just 29 months. “When we designed the 707,” Sutter recalled, of the days before his 747 assignment, Boeing wrote the certification rules for the jet. “The CAA, the FAA wasn’t around yet, they didn’t know how to certify an airplane. We taught them how to… Read More…

READ THE UPDATE HERE Confused yet? You’re not alone. Anybody watching the three men at today’s Dreamliner news conference might have felt like that they were listening to that country & western song in which a husband still trying to defend himself after being caught with his mistress asks his wife, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?” Over the past few months anyone paying a modicum of attention has seen Boeing’s game-changing 787 fly from one problem to another until this week when, in a crescendo worthy of a Japanese horror film, there were four unfortunate events including a battery fire on the… Read More…

At the risk of sounding as if I’d been sucked into the enthusiasm generated by the marching band, the fireworks, the laser show and the smoke machine, let me just say that the rollout of the first Boeing 787 to be assembled outside of Washington state was an impressive event. Just 2 years after turning a Carolina swamp into an million-plus square foot airline manufacturing and assembly plant, the shiny new airliner, the first of seven bound for Air India’s fleet emerged from the darkened hangar. On the other side, waiting in the bright sun were Boeing employees and thousands of other guests who waved… Read More…