Tag: Pilots

Boeing Directs Airlines to Check 787 Cockpit Seats After Latam Incident

Boeing has told airlines to check the cockpit seats of its 787 Dreamliner plane, the company said on Friday, after a Latam Airlines plane suddenly plunged on a flight to Auckland, New Zealand, on Monday, injuring passengers. The drop in altitude appears to have been caused when a flight attendant hit a switch on a […]

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Cockpit Recording’s Erasure Hampers Boeing 737 Max 9 Investigation

Officials investigating why a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew open during an Alaska Airlines flight last week say they are struggling to piece together exactly what happened because the plane’s cockpit voice recorder overwrote itself before it could be retrieved. This is not a new problem. The National Transportation Safety Board, which […]

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Cockpit Recording’s Erasure Hampers Boeing 737 Max 9 Investigation

Officials investigating why a panel on a Boeing 737 Max 9 blew open during an Alaska Airlines flight last week say they are struggling to piece together exactly what happened because the plane’s cockpit voice recorder overwrote itself before it could be retrieved. This is not a new problem. The National Transportation Safety Board, which […]

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F.A.A. Orders Airlines to Ground Some Boeing 737 Max 9 Jets After Midair Emergency

The Federal Aviation Administration on Saturday ordered U.S. airlines to stop using some Boeing 737 Max 9 planes until they were inspected, less than a day after one of those planes lost a chunk of its body in midair, terrifying passengers until the plane landed safely. Alaska and United Airlines on Saturday began canceling dozens […]

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Deadly Plane Crash in Nepal Caused by Pilot Error, Report Finds

A plane crash that killed dozens of people in Nepal in January was caused by a pilot who pulled the incorrect levers while trying to land, the country’s investigators said Thursday. The pilot changed the propeller angle instead of that of the wing flaps, causing a Yeti Airlines plane to lose momentum and fall, killing […]

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Bob Pardo, Pilot in Daring Rescue in Vietnam War, Dies at 89

Bob Pardo, a fighter pilot who during the Vietnam War kept a wingman’s damaged plane aloft in a daring feat of aviation that became known as the Pardo Push, died on Dec. 5 in a hospital near his home in College Station, Texas. He was 89. His wife, Kathryn Pardo, said the cause was lung […]

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Alaska Airlines Pilot Who Used Mushrooms Indicted, but Not for Attempted Murder

The News A pilot accused of trying to crash an Alaska Airlines jetliner in Oregon will no longer face charges of attempted murder. A grand jury voted instead to indict the pilot, Joseph Emerson, on a felony charge of endangering an aircraft and 83 misdemeanor counts of reckless endangerment, officials said on Tuesday. Background: The […]

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Electronic Warfare Confounds Civilian Pilots, Far From Any Battlefield

Electronic warfare in the Middle East and Ukraine is affecting air travel far from the battlefields, unnerving pilots and exposing an unintended consequence of a tactic that experts say will become more common. Planes are losing satellite signals, flights have been diverted and pilots have received false location reports or inaccurate warnings that they were […]

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The Invisible War in Ukraine Being Fought Over Radio Waves

The drones began crashing on Ukraine’s front lines, with little explanation. For months, the aerial vehicles supplied by Quantum Systems, a German technology firm, had worked smoothly for Ukraine’s military, swooping through the air to spot enemy tanks and troops in the country’s war against Russia. Then late last year, the machines abruptly started falling […]

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‘Is This Hell?’ The Pilot Accused of Trying to Crash a Plane Tells His Story.

Mr. Emerson, who has pleaded not guilty, said he had no intention of hurting anyone that day. Instead, he said, he was desperate to awaken from a hallucinogenic state that had consumed him since taking psychedelic mushrooms two days earlier, during a weekend getaway with friends to commemorate the death of his best friend. It […]

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Electric Planes, Once a Fantasy, Start to Take to the Skies

Chris Caputo stood on the tarmac at Burlington International Airport in Vermont in early October and looked to the clouds in the distance. He had piloted military and commercial aircraft over a long career, racking up thousands of flight hours, but the trip he was about to take would be very different. That’s because the […]

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Pilot Who Disrupted Flight Said He Had Taken Psychedelic Mushrooms, Complaint Says

An off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot who tried to shut off the engines during a flight on Sunday told investigators that he thought he was having a nervous breakdown at the time and had consumed psychedelic mushrooms, court documents said. In an interview with the police after he was taken into custody, the pilot, Joseph D. […]

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How Gen. Charles Brown Became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. is known for being steady in a storm. There was the time in 1991 when his F-16 was struck by lightning and he had to eject into the alligator-infested Everglades, earning the call sign “Swamp Thang.” The time in 2020, just days before his Senate confirmation vote to be Air […]

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F-35 Jet Is Missing After Pilot Parachutes Free in South Carolina

Military and government authorities continued a sweeping search on Monday for an F-35 jet that disappeared after a U.S. Marine pilot used an emergency parachute to eject from it on Sunday afternoon in North Charleston, S.C. The pilot, who has not been publicly identified, was in an F-35 from Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. He […]

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Fifty Years Later, the Orphans of Flight 723 Return to the Scene

At the age of 58, stuck in her house through the long nights of the coronavirus pandemic, Michelle Brennen started to spend more and more of her time thinking about the worst thing that had ever happened to her. She was 10, on summer vacation. She had been playing in the yard in Essex Junction, […]

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