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(CNN) - An Asiana Airlines' Boeing 777 crashed and burned Saturday while landing at San Francisco International Airport, sending up a large plume of dark smoke from the aircraft, which lost its tail and much of its roof.

New information earlier this week pointing to a cover-up in the crash of TWA Flight 800 doesn't come as a surprise to at least one local man whose daughter was killed in the 1996 tragedy. Donald Nibert, a retired Penn College forestry professor, said from the beginning all he has wanted is the truth from investigators. "I've always felt this was friendly fire from day one," he said. The crash off Long Island claimed the life of his daughter, Cheryl, along with 15 other Montoursville Area High School students and their five adult chaperones. A film to be released next...

Seventeen years after the Paris-bound TWA Flight 800 blew up off the coast of Long Island, producers Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson have released a new documentary –simply titled “TWA Flight 800” – that has the very real potential to re-open the investigation into the plane’s destruction. Kudos, in particular, to Stalcup. A Ph.D. physicist by background, he has dedicated the last 16 years of his life to exposing what is arguably the most flagrant government cover-up in American peacetime history. Borjesson has likewise been involved from the beginning. As a producer at CBS in 1996 when TWA 800 was...

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.