Free Republic

One recent recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board was to reduce states’ drunken-driving threshold from .08 to .05 blood alcohol content. What do you think? That’s way too strict. 42% Sounds good to me. 35% The standard should be zero. 21%

A U.S. safety group suggests cutting the legal limit for driving while intoxicated from a .08 blood alcohol level to .05. The new level means one alcoholic drink for a woman under 120 lbs. and two drinks for a 160-lbs. man. The National Transportation Safety Board says 100 other countries have adopted the standard and have significantly reduced highway deaths. In Europe, drunken driving deaths were reduced by more than half within 10 years after the standard dropped. NTSB officials acknowledged the new threshold means the safest bet for anyone who has had one or two drinks is to not...

Boston airport firefighters encountered sizzling liquid and a hissing, “exploding” battery when they entered the 787 at the center of a two-month-long National Transportation Safety Board investigation, according to documents released Thursday. The NTSB said Thursday it plans two public hearings next month, one to explore lithium-ion battery technology in general and another to discuss the design and certification of the Boeing 787 battery system. The safety agency announced the hearings as it released an interim factual report and 499 pages of related documents on its investigation of the Japan Airlines 787 fire at the Boston airport on January 7....

A short circuit inside one cell started the 787 battery fire, and assumptions used to certify the battery system proved wrong, the NTSB said Thursday.The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has pinpointed the start of the 787 Dreamliner battery fire on a parked Japan Airlines jet a month ago today as a short circuit inside a single cell. The agency still hasn’t identified the cause of the initial short circuit but has narrowed down the suspects. Details provided by the NTSB make clear that Boeing will have to redesign the battery for a long-term fix. In addition, the NTSB pointed...

The small plane carrying Mexican-American music superstar Jenni Rivera plunged in a nose-dive from more than 28,000 feet and hit the ground at more than 600 mph, Mexico's top transportation official said. Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, Mexico's secretary of communications and transportation, offered a Mexican radio station the first detailed accounts of the moments leading up to the crash that killed Rivera and six other people aboard the Learjet on Sunday. The plane practically nose-dived," Ruiz told Radio Formulate. "The impact must have been terrible." Ruiz said the 43-year-old aircraft hit the ground 1.2 miles from where it began falling and...

The National Transportation Safety Board has been called in to help investigate the plane crash that killed singer Jenni Rivera and six others in northern Mexico over the weekend. Rivera, 43, had performed a concert in Monterrey, Mexico before boarding a Learjet25 early Sunday morning. The flight took off around 3:30 a.m. and was reported missing 10 minutes later after airport officials lost contact with the pilots, Mexican authorities said. Rivera’s makeup artist, lawyer and publicist, as well as the flight crew are all believed to be among those killed in the crash, CBS News reports.

The engine installed on every Boeing 787 built in South Carolina so far has a problem. The first sign something was wrong came on a Saturday afternoon in July when the second locally made Dreamliner experienced a pre-flight engine failure as it accelerated down the runway at Charleston International Airport. A month and a half later, the extent of the defect has become clearer — and bigger. The North Charleston incident was not isolated, as had been the original hope. Instead, two other General Electric-made GEnx engines have been found to suffer from a similar defect in the drive shaft....

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Pilot’s Bill of Rights, which made it through the legislative process in “record time,” according to an official with the Experimental Aircraft Association, has been approved by both the Senate and the House of Representatives and is now on President Obama’s desk awaiting his signature. The president has 10 days from the time it made it to his desk on July 26 to sign the bill, said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a member of the Senate General Aviation Caucus and a CFI with more than 10,000 hours who introduced the bill. “We have every reason to...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal accident investigators recommended states ban the use of cell phones and other electronic devices by all drivers except in emergencies. The National Transportation Safety Board's recommendation followed a finding by the board that the initial collision in a deadly highway pileup in Missouri last year was caused by the inattention of a 19 year-old-pickup driver who sent or received 11 texts in the 11 minutes immediately before the accident. The pickup driver and a 15-year-old student on one of the school buses were killed. Thirty-eight other people were injured. The NTSB's recommendation makes an exception for...

In their first official report on the Reno air race crash earlier this month, federal accident investigators on Friday noted evidence that a small piece of the plane's tail separated shortly before the crash. But investigators did not say whether the loss of the plane's "trim tab" was the cause or the result of the plane's violent maneuvering before it crashed into the ground, killing 11 and injuring 74. The National Transportation Safety Board preliminary report was a straightforward recitation of facts already known in the Sept. 16 crash at Reno Stead Airport in Reno, Nev. Investigators said it typically...

The NTSB has recovered 'components' which may be part of the P-51's horizontal stab and elevator... possibly even the elevator trim tab, which is a specified point of inquiry (as noted in previous ANN reports). The NTSB has received a significant amount of photographic and video evidence -- some of which show the process whereby the elevator trim tab separated from the horizontal stabilizer. There is no evidence of the much-reported 'Mayday' call. We are hearing a number of calls for additional regulation and FAA supervision... despite the fact that this is the first time in nearly 60 years that...

RENO, Nev. – The death toll in the crash of a World War II-era plane during a Reno air race rose to nine people Saturday as investigators combed through wreckage and scoured amateur video clips to determine why the aircraft suddenly spiraled out of control and plummeted to the ground near hundreds of spectators. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/09/17/federal-investigators-looking-into-what-caused-deadly-crash-at-air-show/#ixzz1YGNn9wu6

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A plane carrying first lady Michelle Obama this week came even closer to a big military cargo jet than previously reported, the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday. The distance between the two planes closed to 2.94 miles before air traffic controllers at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington directed the first lady's plane to abort a landing, the board said in a statement.

FAA Announces New Rules Following Aborted Landing of First Lady's Plane Published April 20, 2011 | FoxNews.com The Federal Aviation Administration has announced new procedures following the aborted landing of a presidential plane carrying first lady Michelle Obama that flew too close to a military cargo jet on Monday. FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said that the agency will start requiring a supervisor to monitor movements of flights involving the vice president and first lady, just as the FAA already requires for flights carrying President Obama. "As of today, we are making the same supervisor oversight requirement for (vice president and...

. . . . .During an email conversation with one of my radio show listeners -- retired airline pilot JetDriver2 -- the topic of the DC-10 aircraft came up then quickly shifted over to TWA 800 and its mysterious plunge from the sky over Long Island. The conversation went from there. With his permission I have reprinted it here.*** TWA was acquired by American two months after my retirement in Nov 2000. We never recovered from the July 1996 shoot-down of TWA 800 described by Jack Cashill in his book “First Strike”. This was a massive cover-up (for which I...

Washington (CNN) -- The National Transportation Safety Board Tuesday called on states to require all motorcycle riders wear helmets. The announcement, made at a news conference in Washington, is part of the NTSB's "Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety" -- an initiative directed at state governments. The board added motorcycle safety to the list this year and dropped recreational boating safety -- an area it said improvements have been made.

Polish president dies in air crash A plane carrying Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, has crashed near Smolensk airport in western Russia, killing all on board, Russian officials have reported. Polish officials confirmed on Saturday that Kaczynski was on board the flight with his wife, as well as Slawomir Skrzypek, the president of Poland's central bank, Andrzej Kremer, the deputy foreign minister and the army chief of staff. The crash occurred about 1.5km from Smolensk airport in foggy conditions.

AFP - Investigators scrambled on Sunday to determine if pilot error was to blame for the fiery crash of a Soviet-era airliner that killed Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 96 others. The presidential party was en route to a memorial service for Poles massacred by Soviet troops in World War II when its Tupolev Tu-154 airliner crashed in thick fog while approaching Smolensk airport, in the west of Russia. The disaster sent Poland into shock.

Under-inflated tyres caused a learjet to crash killing four people and ... The National Transportation Safety Board also said a design flaw in the Learjet 60 and a decision by the flight's captain to abort takeoff in Columbia, South Carolina, were also at fault in the accident. Investigators told the board they found that operators of air charters often are not aware how rapidly the tires of some business jets can lose pressure and are not checking tire pressure frequently enough. "This accident didn't have to happen," ... The board also said the Federal Aviation Administration and Learjet Inc., a...

Man flew plane into IRS Building after setting his house on fire in Texas.

The probable cause of the Colgan Air crash that killed 50 people near Buffalo, N.Y., a year ago was the captain's inappropriate response, characterized as "startle and confusion," after the stick shaker was activated, pulling back when he should have pushed forward, the NTSB reported in a hearing on Tuesday. Contributing factors included the crew's failure to monitor airspeed and their violation of the sterile-cockpit rule. In the daylong hearing, which ran past 7 p.m., the board split over the issue of whether or not fatigue was a contributing factor in the accident. Board chairman Deborah Hersman argued that several...

Washington (CNN) -- Confronted with signs that his plane was entering an aerodynamic stall, the pilot of Continental Flight 3407 pulled on the plane's control column when he should have pushed -- a simple but inexplicable error that led to the death of 50 people, the National Transportation Safety Board ruled Tuesday evening. The board's ruling, coming a year after the crash near Buffalo, New York, is stark in its simplicity.

An NTSB audio recording indicates that minutes before a collision between a helicopter and airplane that killed all nine occupants over the Hudson River last month, the pilot of the airplane appears to have misheard the radio frequency for the air traffic control tower he was instructed to communicate with. An air traffic controller instructed the pilot to tune in to the Newark Liberty International Airport frequency, 127.85, but the pilot read back 127.87, and the controller, who was alone in the tower and was having a personal phone call, missed the incorrect read-back.

Federal safety officials say an air traffic controller should have warned the pilot of a small plane that collided with a helicopter over the Hudson River that there were other aircraft in his path. The Aug. 8 accident in the heavily-trafficked skies over the Hudson killed nine people, and caused politicians to call for a revamping of the rules that govern the airspace around Manhattan. The National Transportation Safety Board said in a letter released Thursday that if the controller at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey had been following procedures he would have warned the pilot of the other traffic...

The National Transportation Safety Board today removed the National Air Traffic Controllers Association as a party to its investigation into the August 8 midair collision of two aircraft over the Hudson River that killed all 9 persons aboard. Under the Safety Board's procedures, organizations and agencies are invited to participate in NTSB investigations if they can provide technical expertise. At the outset of the investigation, the organizations sign an agreement to abide by NTSB party rules. Among the rules parties agree to is that they will not reveal investigative information being learned through that process, nor publicly comment on it....

As federal officials investigate last week's deadly collision between a helicopter and small plane over the Hudson River, new details are emerging about the conduct of an air traffic controller in the moments before the crash. A report by the National Transportation Safety Board says a controller at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey made a phone call after clearing the single-engine Piper plane for takeoff on August 8 at 11:48 a.m. According to the Associated Press, the controller's conversation was about a dead cat that had been removed from the airport. The report says the controller then told the pilot...

Three planes landed during "inconvenient" incidentAs investigators revealed that a Teterboro air traffic controller making a personal phone call initially failed to warn a small plane of aircraft in its way, NBC New York has learned the same tower involved in the fatal collision over the Hudson had another piece of bad luck recently. The FAA confirms the only controller on duty on the overnight shift at Teterboro airport back on July 5th was inadvertently locked out of the cab, or work area, for 43 minutes. "There was an inconvenience, but he took appropriate steps," said FAA spokesman Jim Peters....

WASHINGTON – Aircraft design standards aren't tough enough for planes to withstand collisions with growing numbers of large birds, safety investigators examining an Oklahoma crash that killed five men said Tuesday. The Federal Aviation Administration requires the bodies of commercial aircraft to withstand a collision with a bird weighing 4 pounds or 8 pounds depending upon the section of the plane — standards that haven't been updated since the 1970s, investigators told the National Transportation Safety Board. An FAA advisory committee spent 10 years examining whether the standards should be updated and then disbanded without reaching a conclusion, investigators said....

WASHINGTON--Skillful piloting may have prevented a disaster for President Barack Obama and his campaign last summer, a former federal safety official said Friday. A report released by the National Transportation Safety Board indicates an inflated slide may have pressed against critical control cables, forcing the emergency landing of Obama¹s campaign plane on July 7, 2008. The slide inflated inside the tail cone of the campaign¹s McDonnell Douglas MD-81 shortly after takeoff from Chicago¹s Midway International Airport, the report said. Investigators found evidence that the slide and a broken walkway railing inside the tail cone may have pressed against elevator cables...

PARIS (Reuters) - The state of the wreckage from Air France flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which crashed on June 1 with 228 people on board, suggest the plane was not destroyed in mid-air, French investigators said on Thursday. Alain Bouillard, who leads the investigation on behalf of France's BEA air accident board, said the search for the flight recorders, or black boxes, from the Airbus A330 aircraft would continue until July 10.

A key circuit on the train track near Monday's derailment in Washington, D.C., was apparently not operating as it should have been, raising the possibility that the Metro train that crashed into another one may not have known to slow down, accident investigators said today. Investigators tested six circuits between the two stations where the crash occurred. Five of those performed as expected, according to National Transportation Safety Board investigator Deborah Hersman. Such circuits let trains know how fast to go and provide them with information about whether there's another train up ahead. But one circuit showed what Hersman described...

WASHINGTON – Investigators looking into the deadly crash of two Metro transit trains focused Tuesday on why a computerized system failed to halt an oncoming train, and why the train failed to stop even though the emergency brake was pressed. At the time of the crash, the train was also operating in automatic mode, meaning it was controlled primarily by computer. In that mode, the operator's main job is to open and close the doors and respond in case of an emergency. Debbie Hersman, an investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, said it was unclear if the emergency brake...

Last week I wrote that about the suppression of an EPA report identifying the locations of “high hazard” coal sludge sites. I questioned whether the federal government was giving another government entity favored treatment, in this case the TVA -- which was the source of the original massive spill. It appears this may have been so the case of the fatal subway crash in Washington DC. In a report in the Washington Post today, a NTSB Board member says Metro failed to heed the advice of federal regulators to either strengthen the cars or take them out of service. They...

Autopsies revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France disaster victims, a Brazilian official said Wednesday. Experts said those injuries — and the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic — strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air.

Even after Flight 1549 glided to a near-perfect forced landing on the Hudson River in January, the plane and its 155 passengers and crew came within inches of catastrophe when someone cracked open a rear door, sending water gushing into the cabin. Who opened the door is one of the questions the National Transportation Safety Board hopes to answer during three days of hearings on the accident beginning Tuesday. Other issues include crew training for forced water landings and dual engine failures, whether aircraft standards for ditching are adequate, bird detection and mitigation efforts at airports, and whether engine standards...

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The pilots of the Continental Connection turboprop that crashed in February near Buffalo N.Y., rushed through mandatory checklists in a matter of seconds, but spent almost the entire 59-minute flight from Newark, N.J., bantering about personal issues, job goals and the theoretical hazards of ice accumulation during winter flying, according to the cockpit recorder transcript released Tuesday by federal investigators.

Ice buildup wasn't a major factor in last month's Colgan Air Inc. commuter-plane crash that killed 50 people near Buffalo, N.Y., federal investigators said. In its latest update on the investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board said ice "had a minimal impact" on the performance or handling of the twin engine turboprop. Instead, the safety board said the latest evidence indicates the plane didn't experience any mechanical problems and that it was flying and reacting normally to cockpit commands when its speed bled off and it went into a fatal roll.

Jim Hall Says ATR 42, Q400 Have Inherent Risks In Icing Even as the National Transportation Safety Board continues its investigation into the downing of Continental Connection Flight 3407 near Buffalo, NY -- and investigators take pains to note it's too soon to draw any conclusions about what caused the fatal crash -- a former head of the NTSB says all twin-engine turboprop airliners should be grounded immediately. The Toronto Star reports Jim Hall -- who was appointed by then-President Clinton to head up NTSB in 1994, and left in 2001

Q400 Pitched Up 31 Degrees Before Crash The crew of the Bombardier Q400 that crashed in Buffalo on Thursday got a stall warning and the stick pusher engaged but still the aircraft pitched upward 31 degrees before turning almost 180 degrees and dropping onto a house in the Buffalo suburb of Clarence Center, near the outer marker for Buffalo Niagara International Airport. The sequence of events, which included a 45-degree dive with a 106-degree right bank ended 26 seconds later in the fireball on the ground, killing 49 people on the plane and one on the ground, the owner of...

Associated Press CLARENCE, N.Y. – Investigators have recovered the two "black boxes" from the burned-out wreckage of a plane that crashed near Buffalo and killed 50 people. Spokesman Keith Holloway of the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that the flight data and cockpit voice recorders have already been sent to Washington for examination...

Minutes before Continental Flight 3407 plummeted to the ground killing all on board the pilots noticed a build up of ice on the plane's wings and windshield, an official said Friday. The plane was on its approach to Buffalo airport, New York state, when the crew spotted the problem, according to recordings taken earlier Friday from the aircraft's black boxes after the crash left 50 dead. "The crew discussed significant ice buildup, ice on the windshield and leading edge of the wings," Steve Chealander, an official with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), told a press conference. "The crew briefed...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bird remains were found in both engines of a US Airways jetliner that lost power and ditched in New York's Hudson River last month, U.S. transportation investigators said on Wednesday. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said both engines of the Airbus A320 were damaged and contained "organic material" that was sent to bird experts at the Smithsonian Institution for identification. The board previously had said bird remains were found in the right engine, and now has confirmed the same in the left engine. The pilot of Flight 1549 bound for Charlotte, North Carolina, radioed to air...

NEW YORK – The investigation of the emergency crash landing of a US Airways jetliner will last a year and the lessons will go on for decades. That's the word from Robert Benzon, the National Transportation Safety Board's chief investigator on the crash. He spoke on Monday as teams of investigators began the lengthy process of analyzing the damage to each part of the aircraft.

NEW YORK – Investigators now say the right engine of the miracle US Airways jet is still attached to the airplane. A spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday that both engines broke apart from the jet after it hit the water. But on Saturday, NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said the engine is still on the plane. He said visibility in the water was so bad earlier that divers could not see the engine. NEW YORK (AP) — Investigators encountered more treacherous conditions Saturday as they embarked on the delicate task of trying to hoist the miracle US...

<p>Some experts think so. In a Times report today, they point to a similar accident near Silver Spring, Md., in 1996.</p> <p>Eight passengers and all three crew members on a Maryland Rail Commuter train died in that fiery collision.</p> <p>“The actions of the MARC train engineer prompted two questions that would need to be answered to understand the accident events,” officials with the National Transportation Safety Board wrote in their final report. “Why did he behave as he did? How could a well-respected, experienced engineer forget a signal?”</p>

Justice of the Peace Tom Gillam tells KFDM News a third body has been recovered from the Gulf and the search continues for two other people who were on a helicopter that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico, south of Sabine Pass. Petty Officer Renee Aiello tells KFDM News the helicopter was reported down at 9:47 a.m. Thursday about two miles off the coast of Sabine Pass. She says the call came into the 8th District Operations Center in New Orleans from Rotorcraft, a helicopter leasing company. Aiello says the helicopter pilot had not checked in as scheduled. Aiello says...

It's official. The Interstate 35W bridge fell -- not because of what Tim Pawlenty or Carol Molnau did or didn't do -- but because engineers failed to calculate correctly the thickness of gusset plates more than 40 years ago. The National Transportation Safety Board's findings, released on Nov. 14, must feel like some vindication to Pawlenty, Molnau and MnDOT's bridge inspection and maintenance team. After the collapse, Pawlenty counseled patience. He urged Minnesotans to wait for a thorough investigation before leaping to conclusions about why the bridge fell. Instead, critics launched a relentless -- if often subtly expressed -- search...

On October 31st 1999 EgyptAir Flight 990 struck the ocean with the loss of all on board. The end of the NTSB's final summary reads thusly "The National Transportation Safety Board determines that the probable cause of the EgyptAir flight 990 accident is the airplane's departure from normal cruise flight and subsequent impact with the Atlantic Ocean as a result of the relief first officer's flight control inputs. The reason for the relief first officer's actions was not determined."

LOS ANGELES - In a surprisingly swift assessment, the operators of the commuter train involved in the head-on crash that killed at least 25 people blamed its engineer for the horrific accident. ADVERTISEMENT However, a National Transportation Safety Board member cautioned that it was too early to establish the cause of Friday's accident. Others, too, questioned the timing of the operator's move to affix culpability. Rescuers were still sifting through the twisted wreckage Saturday when Metrolink announced — 19 hours after the crash — that its preliminary investigation determined the engineer failed to heed a red signal light, leading to...

JUNCTION CITY, Calif. (CBS) ― Nine people are missing and feared dead in a helicopter crash in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman said Wednesday. The crash happened Tuesday night as the helicopter was transporting firefighters battling a wildfire north of Junction City. FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the helicopter was carrying 11 firefighters and two crew members when it went down. Four people have been taken to the hospital with severe burns. Two of the survivors were in critical condition at the University of California Medical Center in Sacramento, Forest Service spokesman Mike Odle said Wednesday,...