April 6 at 6:28 a.m.
Filed under:
Airplanes
By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
The NTSB displays the 5-foot-long fuselage skin section taken from the Southwest Airlines accident aircraft on Tuesday. (Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty)
Boeing Co. said Tuesday that its engineering and safety experts were caught off guard by Friday’s rupture in the fuselage of a midair Southwest Airlines Co. jet, failing to anticipate the risks of such an incident “until much, much later” in the aircraft’s life.
In an attempt to explain what went wrong, including technical missteps by Boeing, a senior company engineer laid out some of the decisions and analyses by the aerospace giant that unwittingly set the stage for the five-foot tear in the aluminum skin of the 15-year-old Boeing 737 aircraft. The tear led to the rapid decompression of the passenger cabin while the plane was cruising at 36,000 feet, but no one was seriously injured. Get the full story »
March 24 at 6:21 a.m.
Filed under:
Airlines,
Airports
By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
The air traffic tower at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington. (Karen Bleier/Getty)
Federal air-safety officials are looking into why the lone air-traffic controller on duty at Washington’s Reagan National Airport early Wednesday repeatedly failed to respond to pilots of two approaching aircraft, forcing both jetliners to land without clearance.
Pilots of an American Airlines jet on final approach tried in vain to contact the tower. A few minutes later, a United Airlines jet, en route from Chicago, experienced the same problem, according to federal air-safety officials. Get the full story »
Jan. 28 at 6:07 a.m.
Filed under:
Airlines
By Associated Press
Federal safety officials urge parents to put their children in child seat on planes, but a California mother says that twice in the last month she has been thwarted by airlines when she tried to do the right thing.
Melissa Bradley, 39, said she was forced off a United Airlines flight at San Francisco International Airport on Wednesday in a dispute over an economy-class row too narrow to accommodate an infant carrier for her 1-year-old daughter. Get the full story »
Jan. 11 at 2:00 p.m.
Filed under:
Airplanes,
Government
By Associated Press
U.S. government safety officials urged Tuesday that aircraft owners be required to retrofit small planes with shoulder-lap seat belts but stopped short of calling for the installation of air bags.
A three-year study of small plane accidents released by the National Transportation Safety Board found several cases in which air bags prevented serious injuries or fatalities. But investigators said that since only about 7,000 planes have air bags, there haven’t been enough accidents to judge whether they should be required on all planes. Get the full story »
June 29, 2010 at 5:43 a.m.
Filed under:
Airplanes
By Associated Press
U.S. federal aviation officials have known for years that cockpit window heaters in some Boeing planes catch fire. But they haven’t required airlines to fix the problem, even after dozens of incidents that unnerved pilots and, in some cases, forced emergency landings. Get the full story »
June 21, 2010 at 6:14 a.m.
Filed under:
Airplanes
By Dow Jones Newswires-Wall Street Journal
A cockpit blaze aboard a United Airlines jet last month revived a long-running debate over the dangers of potential windshield electrical fires on hundreds of Boeing aircraft.
But now, the incident also has focused attention on a related safety issue: Pilot complaints that emergency cockpit-oxygen systems on many of the same planes aren’t adequate to cope with such hazards. Get the full story »
