Free Republic

After the Reagan Airport disaster, will we finally reform the FAA?We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left...

The pilot had a history of acting “impulsively” during training and “an inability to remain calm during stressful situations,” an investigator said. These deficits would prove deadly.

A Horizon Air passenger plane crashed on an island in Puget Sound Friday night, not long after a suspect conducted an "unauthorized take-off" from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington state, officials said. Witnesses reported seeing a large plume of smoke in the air above Ketron Island after the plane went down. No passengers were believed to be aboard the Q400 aircraft, airport officials said. No one on the sparsely inhabited island was believed to have been injured, the Pierce County Sheriff's Department said on Twitter.The unidentified pilot was a 29-year-old "suicidal male," the sheriff's department said. The Seattle Times reported...

Sen. Ted Stevens’ death in a small plane that crashed in a remote part of Alaska adds another sad chapter to the story of politicians who have died in airplane accidents over the past several decades. Stevens had already survived another plane crash in the state 1978 while his wife, Ann, died. The frequency of their travel, trips to often remote areas and the use of small, private planes make politicians much more likely victims of plane crashes. Here are others whose fatal crashes made headlines over the past few decades: • In 1972, a plane carrying then-House Majority Leader...

<p>A BA flight to Washington was cancelled at the last minute yesterday after an intelligence tip-off that a woman suicide bomber planned to blow up the plane over the US capital.</p> <p>It was the third day running that a major security scare had hit the afternoon Flight 223 service from Heathrow to Washington.</p>