Boeing’s much-discussed but hardly assured shake-up was announced early this morning. The company CEO, David Calhoun will resign at the end of 2024, and the president of the Commercial Airplane division, Stan Deal leaves immediately. Chairman of the Board, Larry Kellner will not run for reelection to the post he has held for the past 5 years. “The eyes of the world are on us, and I know we will come through this moment a better company,” Calhoun said in a letter. How strong the desire was to improve in areas beyond those linked directly to the bottom line is debatable. I suspect what finally… Read More…

Two planes collided Sunday while attempting to land following the last race of the day at the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada. Both pilots were killed. The National Transportation Safety Board tweeted it would investigate why the World War 2 era airplanes – two different versions of the T6 trainer – collided as the pilots were landing. Fred Telling, chairman of the Reno Air Racing Association told a reporter, “I am completely devastated and heartbroken today.” Pilots Nick Macky and Chris Rushing had just completed the difficult phase of the Gold race for the T6 airplanes, which includes flying steep banks as the… Read More…

Saturday, July 17th marks the 25th anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747 that exploded shortly after takeoff from New York, killing all 230 people on board.  While many events since that day in 1996 have eclipsed the story in size and scope (the 9/11 attacks and the Corona pandemic to name but two) the theory lives on that the official cause of the crash was covered up. “Look-backs” at the accident necessarily include the unlikely scenario that the flight from New York to Paris was felled by a missile. But the theory flies in the face of overwhelming evidence that… Read More…

This post has been updated to included confirmation of Kallstrom’s death and details concerning the cause of death. James Kallstrom, the 78-year old former head of the New York office of the FBI, died on July 3rd. According to the Marine Corps-Law Enforcement Foundation, Kallstrom struggled for six years with an illness related to his exposure to Agent Orange while serving in Vietnam in the sixties. Edmond J. Boran, the foundation’s president told me Wednesday morning that Kallstrom’s exposure in 1966 and 1967 only began to trouble him fifty years later when a mysterious rash appeared on his upper torso. He was treated with chemotherapy…. Read More…

The death of Southwest Airlines passenger Jennifer Riordan was as horrific as it was surprising. The 43-year-old executive from Albuquerque was partially sucked out of the window of a Boeing 737 on a flight to Dallas in April when one of the plane’s engines came apart and pieces penetrated the passenger cabin. On Wednesday, at a hearing before the National Transportation Safety Board which is investigating the accident, a representative for the Federal Aviation Administration admitted that the way the engine came apart, damaging the airplane and triggering the decompression that pulled Riordan through a broken window, should not have happened under engine certification requirements…. Read More…

A Boeing 747 Sky Lease Cargo flight skidded off the end of runway 14/32 at Halifax Stanfield International Airport, after a flight from Chicago on Wednesday morning. Nathan Coleman of Canada’s weathernetwork.com captured photos and video of the jumbo jet, up to its lower cowlings in the dirt on the left side and resting on the fuselage. Video just shot at the scene @weathernetwork pic.twitter.com/Pi7DorhDW0 — Nathan Coleman (@NateTWN) November 7, 2018 The airport was shut down shortly after 5:00 am local time but some flights have resumed. Four people, all members of the crew were taken to the hospital. There does not appear to have been… Read More…

The pilots whose 2017 flight very nearly landed atop four loaded airliners waiting in line on a taxiway to take off from San Francisco International Airport, failed to manually tune the airplane’s navigation system for the landing. Had they done so, it may have helped them realize they were off the lateral track for the runway, according to investigators looking into the near disaster. Tuning the instrument landing system frequency was not a typical procedure for the Air Canada crews. This lapse was one but not the only factor that led the pilots of Flight 759 to get “dangerously close to other airplanes” so that at… Read More…

Anyone who has ever watched one of those air disaster programs on television can be forgiven for believing that there is always an “ah hah” moment, the penultimate step to discovering what went wrong. From the disappearance of aviatrix Amelia Earhart in 1937 to the still-missing flight of Malaysia 370, accident probes are never easy and rarely are they independent. They are clouded with complications; The biases of the investigators, the agendas of interested parties and the pressures from industry and government. In his new book, Scapegoat, A Flight Crews’ Journey From Heroes, to Villains, to Redemption, author and airline pilot Emilio Corsetti III tells… 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…

The pilots in command of the Air Canada Airbus A320 which nearly landed on top of four airliners in San Francisco last summer, were experienced airmen, an investigation shows. The captain who was flying that night, had 20,000 hours with 4,000 in the Airbus A320 while the first officer had 10,000 hours. Still, the two attempted to land on a taxiway on which four airliners were waiting to to depart. Camera footage of the near collision of Air Canada Flight 759 was released today by the National Transportation Safety Board which is investigating what might have been a multi-airliner pileup and a disaster of record-breaking potential…. Read More…