Listening to BP and Transocean executives testify about the Deepwater Horizon disaster is very much like hearing airline executives following an air crash testifying to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The selective memory, or non-memory, is breathtaking in its scope – until attentive NTSB...

The 10 August plane crash in the wilds of Alaska that killed former Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AL) is the latest in a long line of crashes that have killed politicians. Not that politicians as a group engage in risky behavior, but they do tend to...

Investigation of the 20 July 2010 turbulence incident involving a United Airlines B777 over Missouri has just begun, but already a broader question arises: why haven’t all the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations to combat exposure to turbulence had an effect? People are still...

The “letter war” between the two agencies is not improving safety, but it is proof of the old adage that three inches of flame will shield one’s derriere from accountability. Case in point: the recommendations issued in 2006 to improve the safety of medical evacuation flights,...

There is something deeply paradoxical and disconcerting about the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Here is an agency that touts safety as its highest priority, yet its actions are dilatory, incomplete, and reflect a regulatory lassitude that is inexcusable. Four recent examples certainly suggest this damning indictment.

For a highly pertinent example of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) not following-up on its own research, look no further than its requirements for life preservers. I use life preservers as my prime example because, unlike avionics and other esoteric electro-mechanicals of airplanes, most people...

At a Congressional hearing 15 June on the BP oil-drilling and ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, a legislator declared that if the airline industry operated with the same sloppy standards as the oil industry – no functional blow out preventer, inadequate training of...

Greater “professionalism” is badly needed in the airline industry, but no one person or organization seems to have defined it succinctly yet broadly to capture the qualities needed. That much is evident from a 2½ day forum on the subject of pilot and air traffic...

There is a telling indicator of what may have happened as the Afriqiyah Airways A330 attempted to land at Tripoli airport on 12 May. Amid the shattered wreckage on the approach to runway 09, the largest piece is the tail – and it’s pointed backward...

As the building into which they were about to crash filled the windscreen, the two pilots of the TAM A320 probably did not realize that one of their throttles was in CLIMB while the other was in REVERSE. The TAM Linhas Aéreas A320 was landing 17...