Much praise goes to the crew of AeroMexico Flight 2431 and rescue workers who arrived on the scene of the accident in Durango on Tuesday. Passengers said a fire quickly engulfed the Embraer 190 after it overran the runway, still on airport property, not far from a radar array. But there are many in the industry whose hard work goes unseen and yet they are directly responsible for making accidents like this survivable. If AeroMexico Flight 2431 has any impact, I hope it will be to show the world’s air travelers the infrastructure that supports safety and that even passengers have a role to play…. 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…

The pilot of the Eurocopter AS350 that lost engine power while flying over New York’s Central Park on March 11, briefly considered putting the helicopter down in Central Park but concluded there were too many people on the ground below. Instead, Richard Vance tried to slow the helicopter’s descent as he flew toward the East River in the aircraft on which the doors had been removed to enhance visibility for sightseeing. In an interview with the National Transportation Safety Board after the accident that killed all five passengers, Vance, 33, said when the helicopter first hit the river and began to fill with water, he… Read More…

This pathetic looking Kenya Airways Boeing 737 is just eight years old, but my, oh my, what havoc a tow truck can do! The unfortunate run-in between the ground handling equipment and the 737 registration 5Y-KYF happened before midnight on Saturday July 23rd at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport as the plane was parked at the gate. No one was aboard and the plane was being serviced for its daily 4-hour flight to Johannesburg. There’s no way to consider this good news, but the airline can be thankful for one thing. This happened the only day of the week the flight is conducted on a… Read More…

The Washington Post tagged a story on Donald Trump’s first days as U.S. President with the alarming proclamation that he was “blocking regulations, including one to prevent plane crashes.” Without wading into the morass that is federal politics in America these days, let’s just be clear about what Trump actually did. Shortly after taking office Friday, Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, ordered a number of government agencies to withdraw proposed rules from publication in the federal register, the last stop before the “proposed” comes off and the rule becomes law. From the Department of Housing to the Interior Department, senior lawyers must have worked through the… Read More…

Credit to Paige Kelton of Jacksonville’s WJAX-TV, for doing the heavy lift and reviewing 2,400 pages of FAA incident reports on Allegiant Air. In her report last week, Kelton reveals that the documents show seventy-six flights into Florida over a two year period had safety issues grave enough to require they be reported to the feds. Where I’ll argue with the report is in the conclusion of her safety expert who credits the pilots for the fact that the airline hasn’t had any fatal accidents. Allegiant’s pilots may be fantastic but attributing the lack of a catastrophe on the flight crew is a two edged sword. When disaster arrives… 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…

There is a genre of aviation writing, typified by Antoine St. Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, Richard Bach and Rinker Buck that focuses on the link between the machine and the person flying it. These pilots write not just about the sky around them but the space within. Chesley Sullenberger’s fine memoir, Highest Duty, My Search for What Really Matters, joins this group. In the year months since he brought crippled US Airways Flight 1549 safely down in the Hudson River, Chesley Sullenberger has become the face of modern aviation. But it is doubtful he would ever have put pen to paper had fame not been… Read More…