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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,...

Safety Group Urges Airbus Fixes LOS ANGELES -- U.S. aviation safety watchdogs, concerned about severe electrical problems that have blacked out cockpit displays on dozens of Airbus jetliners over the years, urged regulators on both sides of the Atlantic to mandate aircraft fixes and enhanced pilot training to alleviate such hazards. Recommendations released by the National Transportation Safety Board Wednesday cite 49 incidents over the years in which electrical problems caused various cockpit displays on widely-used Airbus A319 and A320 to suddenly stop functioning and temporarily go blank during flight. According to the board, seven of those incidents resulted in...

Train Blocks Chili Avenue by Rich Turner Published Mar 24, 2008 A disabled train has Chili Avenue blocked at the 3300 block, near Old Chili-Scottsville Road. The train hit a boulder on the tracks, causing

Old photos of the Interstate 35W bridge show two steel connecting plates were visibly bent as early as 2003 — four years before the span collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people. Minnesota Department of Transportation officials declined to say when the state first knew about the bending in the pieces of steel, called gusset plates. Two photos, part of a report issued earlier this month by the National Transportation Safety Board, reveal slight bends in gusset plates that hold beams together at two separate connecting points. The plates are in areas believed to be among the first points...

...Tonight's "The Final Report: Investigation of TWA Flight 800" on National Geographic Channel presents a brilliant, well-researched look into what the investigators found - and what they didn't find. The show details the animosity that existed from day one between the NTSB and the FBI. The NTSB is usually the final word in all air crashes. But because a number of eyewitnesses on the ground saw streaks flying towards the aircraft right before it exploded, and air traffic controllers reporting blips around the aircraft, the FBI came in and took over the investigation, calling it a possible crime. There were...

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Two engines on the British Airways plane which crash landed at Heathrow "did not respond" to a demand for increased thrust about two miles from touchdown, an initial report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch said Friday. The report describes the Boeing 777 hitting problems 600ft off the ground and descending rapidly but just making it onto Heathrow land The report says: "Initial indications from (crew) interviews and Flight Recorder analyses show the flight and approach to have progressed normally until the aircraft was established on late finals for Runway 27L. "At approximately 600ft and two...

A small plane that tried to turn back to the Kodiak airport just minutes after taking off for a short flight to Homer nose-dived into the harbor off the end of the runway Saturday afternoon, killing six people and injuring four, according to the Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board. Dean Andrew, a pilot in another aircraft who had been taxiing nearby, arrived in his floatplane just after the crash. He saw two people standing waist deep in water on the sunken fuselage and two others in the water nearby. He pulled all four aboard his plane

WASHINGTON - To help reduce the risk of fires, air travelers will no longer be able to pack loose lithium batteries in checked luggage beginning Jan. 1, the Transportation Department said Friday. Passengers can still check baggage with lithium batteries if they are installed in electronic devices, such as cameras, cell phones and laptop computers. If packed in plastic bags, batteries may be in carryon baggage. The limit is two batteries per passenger. The ban affects shipments of non-rechargeable lithium batteries, such as those made by Energizer Holdings Inc. and Procter & Gamble Co.'s Duracell brand. "Doing something as simple...

A. Scott Crossfield was flying through thick clouds 10,000 feet above rugged Georgia wilderness when turbulence began to batter his single-engine plane. The legendary test pilot, who, for a moment in history, was the fastest man alive, had cheated death many times. But not this time. An hour into a flight home from Alabama to Manassas Regional Airport, the Herndon resident plowed straight into an intense thunderstorm. He banked and tried to turn around. But it was too late. A. Scott Crossfield in 1953, the year he flew at twice the speed of sound, or Mach 2. The legendary test...

MINNEAPOLIS, Aug. 8 — Investigators have found what may be a design flaw in the bridge that collapsed here a week ago, in the steel parts that connect girders, raising safety concerns for other bridges around the country, federal officials said on Wednesday. The Federal Highway Administration swiftly responded by urging all states to take extra care with how much weight they place on bridges of any design when sending construction crews to work on them. Crews were doing work on the deck of the Interstate 35W bridge here when it gave way, hurling rush-hour traffic into the Mississippi River...

Though inspections rate more than 70,000 bridges nationwide structurally deficient, a top transportation official Friday called the deadly failure of a Mississippi River bridge an "anomaly" and said motorists shouldn't fear for their safety. "I don't believe that they should be worried at all," National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark Rosenker said while visiting the bridge wreckage in Minneapolis. Rules in place for 30 years "have improved the conditions and the standards that in fact these things are being inspected on," he said. "But with that said, as a result of this catastrophic disaster, we're going to be looking at...

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Federal investigators are looking into whether baggage handlers at the Syracuse airport caused a 12-inch hole in the fuselage of a Northwest Airlines passenger jet forced to make an emergency landing in Buffalo, N.Y., last month. The Detroit-bound Northwest Airlines Flight 1411 was just 20 minutes into its May 18 journey when the crew heard a loud pop. The Douglas DC-9 experienced a loss of cabin pressure and smoke filled the cockpit. The plane landed safely at the Buffalo airport. A preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board does not assess blame or pinpoint the cause...

The crash that killed Cory Lidle, the Yankees pitcher, and his flight instructor in Manhattan on Oct. 11 was caused by “inadequate planning, judgment, and airmanship” by the two men, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded today. Mr. Lidle and his instructor, Tyler Stanger, could have safely completed their U-turn over the East River and avoided hitting an apartment building if they had either kept their turn very sharp from beginning to end, or given up on making it within legal limits, leveled the wings, maintained altitude, and flown over the buildings on the Manhattan side, board officials said. They...

ASHBURN, Va. - TWA Flight 800 burst into flames, broke into pieces and plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean near Long Island, N.Y., in July 1996. All 230 passengers and crewmembers lost their lives. More than 10 years later, a large section of the fuselage has been reconstructed in a Loudoun County hangar at the National Transportation Safety Board's Training Center, a facility rented from GW's satellite campus here in Ashburn, Va. While so many lost their lives on that plane, its reconstruction now serves as an educational tool for students and professionals studying disaster. Most people are unaware of the...

NTSB Chairman Says all Passengers Should Have the Same Level of Safety Regardless of the Age of the Aircraft Washington, DC -- National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Mark V. Rosenker today addressed an aviation conference in California reiterating the agency's concern with aging aircraft. "We have investigated several accidents and incidents that have highlighted the safety implications resulting from aircraft aging and these accidents repeatedly demonstrate the importance of effective airworthiness programs throughout the service life of aircraft," Rosenker said. "With the proper maintenance program, these accidents involving aging aircraft could have been prevented." During his speech in Palm Springs,...

Before dawn on Sunday, August 27th past, Comair Flight 5191 carrying fifty passengers and crew crashed during takeoff, while attempting to depart on a runway one-half the length of the one it was cleared to use. The accident killed all aboard with the exception of the copilot, whose condition was recently upgraded to serious from critical. There is no question that the pilot of the Bombardier CRJ-100/200 (depending on the source) lined-up on the 3,500 ft. runway 26 rather than the 7,000 ft. runway 22. The CRJ-100/200 would normally require about a 5,000 ft takeoff roll. Evidence of tire marks...

LEXINGTON, Ky. - What is known is that a string of mistakes preceded the deadly crash of Comair Flight 5191, but what is less clear is which one was the crucial turning point. Was the problem the airport itself? The captain had to follow an unfamiliar taxi route that had been changed by a repaving project just a week earlier. Or, was it a decision by the tower manager to break the federal rule that two controllers should be working there at all times? Or even earlier, when the airport built intersecting runways rather than parallel ones? "It just breaks...

A family of General Electric engines widely used on Boeing Co. commercial jetliners and some Airbus planes should be inspected more than twice as often as federal regulators are requiring, the National Transportation Safety Board said Monday. The warning comes only a week after the Federal Aviation Administration ordered U.S. airlines to inspect the engines more frequently after one exploded on an American Airlines jet that was on the ground in June, sending a 50-pound piece of metal more than a half mile across Los Angeles International Airport. Had that engine explosion occurred in flight, the NTSB said, the plane...

Wal-Mart heir John Walton made major modifications to his experimental light aircraft in the weeks before he died, according to the final accident report released last week by the National Transportation Safety Board. The report did not give a probable cause for the June 27, 2005, accident that killed 58-year-old Walton. He died from blunt force trauma after crashing his single-engine CGS Hawk Arrow II aircraft while attempting to land at the Jackson Hole Airport in Jackson, Wyo. Walton had repaired the aircraft after a hard landing weeks earlier following a flight home from the builder in West Virginia, the...

Washington (DC) - Laptops get hot, but can they cause a plane to catch on fire? The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating whether laptop batteries caused a UPS cargo plane to catch on fire last February. The DC-8 plane with three crew members made an emergency landing at Philadelphia International Airport after a fire broke out in the cargo hold. The fire continued to burn for four hours destroying the plane and most of the UPS packages inside. Luckily, the crew on board UPS flight 1307 escaped with only minor injuries. In the accident investigation, NTSB officials...

NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Andy Krukar boarded TWA Flight 800 with a diamond ring in his pocket, planning to place it on his fiancee's finger at the Eiffel Tower during a weekend of romantic dinners and strolls through the streets of Paris. The fiancee, Julie Stuart, was going to follow him to Paris the next day to celebrate their formal engagement. AUDIO: TWA 800 Series Part One But Krukar was killed when Flight 800 exploded into a spectacular fireball over the Atlantic Ocean just minutes after taking off from Kennedy Airport — a disaster that claimed the lives...

A Massachusetts group has filed a lawsuit to force federal officials to release information about a piece of debris from Flight 800 that it hopes will show that a missile downed the plane. Federal investigators have dismissed that explanation as the cause of the 1996 explosion that killed all 230 people aboard. Instead they concluded that a spark ignited fuel tank vapors. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boston, demands that the National Transportation Safety Board respond to numerous freedom of information act requests made since 2004. Tom Stalcup, who heads the East Falmouth, Mass.-based Flight 800...

From August 1996 until October 1997, the FBI prefaced nearly every Flight 800 news update with the assertion that its agents were intensively scrutinizing the evidence to determine whether the initial explosion was a bomb, a missile or the result of a mechanical failure, specifically in the fuel tank. Six years of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the FBI has now established that the most precise characterization of the explosion was provided by the victims themselves. Because the reports of many witnesses described a missile-like object rising from the surface, the FBI swarmed to Long Island and took...