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. . . . .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.