No one knows the potential consequences of windshield failure better than Tim Lancaster, who on June 10, 1990, was the pilot-in-command of British Airways Flight 5390 traveling from Birmingham, England, to Malaga, Spain. Suddenly the left windscreen on the BAC 1-11 separated from the fuselage and Capt. Lancaster was immediately jerked out of his seat with such force that his head and entire upper torso were pulled entirely out of the airplane through the opening where his windshield had been. Only his legs remained inside.
The archipelago nation of the Philippines has had a long relationship with the United States dating from the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898 when the islands were ceded to the U.S. as a protectorate, in effect, becoming an American colony and Southeast Asian outpost.
The following information is derived from the NTSB’s preliminary report on the fatal accident involving a Gulfstream GIV at Hanscom Field (BED), Bedford, Massachusetts, on May 31, 2014.
T he NTSB has completed its investigation into the loss of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 — a Boeing 777 that crashed into a seawall then cartwheeled on Runway 28L at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) on July 6, 2013 — with a widely anticipated probable cause finding that the crew let the airplane get low and slow during an unstabilized visual approach.
Aircraft operating costs are presented in a format that separates the data into seven separate areas: Mission Costs, Variable Costs, Fixed Annual Costs, Periodic Costs, Personnel Costs, Training Costs and Facilities Costs.
June 1— About 1400 EDT, an employee from the FBO responding to a de Havilland DHC-6-200 airplane (N223AL), received fatal injuries when she was struck by an operating propeller blade as she walked toward the cockpit while the airplane was standing on a ramp at the Middletown Regional Airport/Hook Field (MWO), near Middletown, Ohio. The airplane was registered to and operated by Win Win Aviation Inc., under FAR Part 91 as a skydiving flight. The local skydiving flight was standing on the MWO ramp while waiting for passengers to board when the accident occurred.
L-3 Aviation Products has been selected to provide its GH-3900 electronic standby instrument system (ESIS) for new production Viking Twin Otter Series 400 aircraft. Canadian-based Viking holds the type certificates for seven legacy de Havilland aircraft — DHC-1 through DHC-7 — and manufactures the 400 Twin Otter. The GH-3900 ESIS is designed to Level A software and hardware standards and can be customized to fit a range of primary systems.
There is something strangely prehistoric about the way many of us continue to fly what we grew up calling a “non-precision” instrument approach. After flying across continents and oceans with navigational precision measured in decimals, we push the nose over a thousand feet per minute “or so” and wait for the minimum descent altitude (MDA). That altitude is measured with an altimeter accurate to plus or minus 75 ft., plus whatever temperature tolerances may exist, and based on an altimeter setting that may be an hour or more old.
It’s one thing to perform an autorotation correctly in the simulator or during a “canned” training session but quite another matter when the engine quits in flight. It’s during the latter that a pilot is prone to revert to first-learned habit patterns. They had better be the right ones, since action is required within 2 sec.
