The NTSB wants the FAA to take quick action that could prevent another mid-air collision over the Hudson River like the one earlier this month that killed nine people. Establishing mandatory altitudes for airplanes and helicopters to fly at while in the congested river corridor is one move that could help, the board said in a letter to the FAA. Requiring all aircraft to monitor and transmit on a common traffic advisory frequency could also make a difference, the letter says. The NTSB wants changes to air traffic control procedures so that controllers would be required to either tell aircraft to switch to the advisory frequency or else clear aircraft to enter the Class B airspace above the river corridor. At the time of the collision, the Piper Lance that was involved had asked for flight following and was being handed off from one controller to another, while the sightseeing helicopter was making position reports on the existing common frequency. The FAA has said it will wait to act until it sees the report from a working group of controllers and safety experts that it convened two weeks ago. That group is expected to complete its work this week, the New York Times reported.

The National Transportation Safety Board is seeking stricter and more thorough regulations that would protect airframes of all sizes from bird strikes. The new recommendation comes as the board released its report into the March 2008 collision of a Cessna 500 jet with a pelican near Oklahoma City. The jet lost control and crashed, killing all five people on board. Similar to recommendations the NTSB made after the ditching of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River earlier this year, the board also wants better reporting and data on aircraft bird strikes. The FAA also should do a better job making sure airports in wildlife areas stick to published plans to deter birds and other animals, the NTSB said. In the Oklahoma City crash, the pelican struck one wing, causing extensive damage to it. The NTSB said it wants to see more published guidance for how pilots should respond in such incidents.

A 61-year-old Indiana man died Thursday when the plane he was flying crashed 300 miles east of his intended destination. William Huff was the only person in the Cirrus SR-22, which was on a flight plan from York, Ne., to a small airport near Indianapolis, the Associated Press reported. Controllers lost contact with the plane as it neared its destination, and the plane kept cruising eastward. Two F-16 fighter jets intercepted the plane and tried to contact the pilot but were unable to. Huff’s last transition, requesting a descent from 25,000 feet as his plane neared Indianapolis, was described as “garbled.” The fighters followed the plane for 300 miles, across Ohio until it crashed about 50 miles north of Charleston, W. Va. It is unclear how Huff became incapacitated or whether he was dead in the cockpit prior to the crash.

New information released last week into a December accident in which a Continental Airlines flight skidded off a runway at Denver as it tried to take off indicates that winds may have been a factor. The flight crew said they were unable to keep the plane centered on the runway, even with full rudder deflection, the Denver Post reported. While a nose wheel steering cable was found broken after the accident, the National Transportation Safety Board hasn’t said yet whether that was a factor. The crosswind component at the time was 25 knots. While the Boeing 737-500 involved in the accident has a demonstrated crosswind component of 35 knots, the maximum crosswind for a plane with the winglets installed, as that one did, is just 22 knots. The records released last week include transcripts of air traffic control communications, as well as maintenance logs, interview notes and weather information. Just 26 minutes after the crash, first responders told the tower controllers that everyone had gotten off the plane. “Two sweeps through the plane, 105 people and crew … I have no word of casualties at all,” a person in an airport operations vehicle said. Several transmissions later, the controller in charge responded, “Man, you made my day, you made my day.”

Federal investigators have not yet come up with an explanation for how a football-size hole ruptured in the top of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-500 fuselage during a flight last week. There were no injuries when a portion of the fuselage opened up, rapidly decompressing the cabin and forcing the plane, traveling from Nashville to Baltimore, to make an emergency landing in West Virginia, ABC News reported. Investigators cut out the damaged section of the fuselage – an area measuring about two feet on each side – to inspect the aluminum, but did not note any obvious signs of fatigue or corrosion. The 15-year-old jet has logged about 42,000 cycles. Following the emergency landing, Southwest inspected all of its 500-series 737s overnight, but did not find problems with any of them. Continental Airlines, which also flies a handful of that model, inspected its planes as well.

It didn’t take long for Capt. Al Haynes to realize that when the tail-mounted engine on his DC-10 failed high above the Great Plains 20 years ago Sunday, it also took the plane’s entire hydraulic control system with it. Haynes, along with the two other flight crew and a DC-10 instructor on United Airlines flight 232, were able to vary the power on the two remaining engines to bring the flight in to a somewhat controlled crash landing at Sioux City, Iowa. One wing dipped as it touched down, setting off an explosion and breaking the plane into several pieces. By the time the pieces came to rest, 111 people had been killed – but Haynes’ deft maneuvering saved the lives of 185 others, the
Seattle Times reported. After the crash, pilots in simulators were unable to successfully land a plane with no usable flight controls as Haynes had done. Though Haynes quickly became a hero, he took three months off to deal with survivor’s guilt, then flew two more years before retiring. Now 77 and living in the Seattle area, Haynes still tours the country to talk about aviation safety. The crash prompted several new safety measures: more thorough engine inspections, as well as shielding and safety valves on hydraulic lines that pass near engines. The cause of the crash was traced to a titanium disk in the engine that had developed small fatigue cracks that no one had caught.

In a report released Thursday, investigators said strong downdrafts forced down adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane, causing it to crash on the side of a rugged peak in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in September 2007. The crash site was discovered more than a year later by a hiker. After that find, investigators reviewed radar data from the day Fossett’s plane disappeared and found a radar track that ended one mile from the crash site, the National Transportation Safety Board said. While investigators briefly reviewed that radar track during the search two years ago, they ruled it out because it didn’t match the time a witness reported seeing a plane like Fossett’s fly over a Nevada town 90 miles to the north. That witness’s recollection of the time turned out to have been off by an hour.

Fossett, who holds scores of aviation records, had taken a Bellanca Super Decathlon up from a private airstrip south of Reno, Nev., to scout dry lake beds for a planned land speed record attempt. He never returned, and one of the largest search efforts in U.S. history failed to locate him or his plane in the month after the crash.

The NTSB said Thursday that Fossett’s plane encountered strong downdrafts that pushed the plane down at a rate greater than its climb rate. High density altitudes — a result of warm temperatures that day — further inhibited the Super Decathlon’s climb performance, the NTSB said. The NTSB calculated downdrafts at the time of the crash were about 400 feet per minute, while the Super Decathlon’s maximum climb rate at the 13,000-foot density altitude was only 300 feet per minute.

Updated 10:22 a.m. CDT on July 10 to provide more details.

The pilot in a Cessna Grand Caravan crash over the Cascade Mountains in 2007 had been flying above 14,000 feet without supplemental oxygen and was hypoxic but likely didn’t know it, the National Transportation Safety Board said in its probable cause report. The plane was returning to its base near Seattle after a weekend skydiving event in Idaho on Oct. 7, 2007. The pilot and nine passengers, all skydivers, were killed in the nighttime crash. The plane was not on an instrument flight plan and, though pilot Phil Kibler had an instrument rating, he had only two hours of flight time in actual instrument conditions before the flight. In the final minutes of the flight, the NTSB said, the plane climbed and descended rapidly as Kibler was likely looking for a clear skies in between cloud layers. In the last few minutes, the plane likely entered clouds and may have accumulated ice. It entered a spin and crashed in a forested area west of Yakima, Wash. The plane flew as high as 15,000 feet shortly before the crash. At that altitude, the NTSB said, the mental acuity of the pilot and passengers would have been severely impaired, but they may not have had any other symptoms that they were oxygen-deprived. Following that crash, the families of one of the victims sued Cessna arguing the plane could not fly safely in icing conditions. That suit is now part of a larger class-action lawsuit awaiting trial.

An electrical short-circuit ignited oxygen hoses on a cargo plane that caught fire on the ground at San Francisco International Airport last year. The ABX Boeing 767, bound for Ohio, was loaded and was about to be started when the fire broke out behind the cockpit, burning a large hole in the top of the fuselage, the NTSB said in a news release. The hose at the source of the fire had a metal spring that heated up when a wire shorted and sent an electrical current through the spring. That caused the plastic hose to catch fire, which grew quickly as there was plenty of oxygen to support it. Had the fire ignited in flight, the outcome could have been “catastrophic,” the NTSB said. While that particular plane’s oxygen system had ongoing problems with leaks, that was not a factor in the fire, the NTSB said. Conductive oxygen hoses should be replaced with hoses that don’t have metal parts, the NTSB said, urging that the oxygen systems in all transport-category aircraft be inspected to make sure hoses are properly insulated from nearby electrical wires.

The initial report by French investigators into the June 1 crash of Air France flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean shows there were communication problems between air traffic controllers in Brazil and Senegal at the time of the crash. Flight 447 never made contact with air traffic controllers in Senegal monitoring a wide swath of the Atlantic, but for several hours, the controllers in Dakar assumed the flight had flown through their airspace and into Cape Verde’s airspace, the French report says. About three hours after taking off, flight 447 sent a string of automated messages over ACARS to Air France that the autopilot had disconnected and that there were several failures on the primary flight displays. For several hours after that, controllers in Dakar and Cape Verde called each other and talked about estimates for where the flight would be, but neither ever had contact with flight 447. Four hours after the burst of ACARS messages that lead up to the crash, and without contact from flight 447, the Dakar controller told the Brazilian controller that the flight had passed into another control area. In the course of its investigation, French authorities found that three other flights in the area at the time deviated as much as 80 miles around large thunderstorms that may have played a role in the crash. Two of those flights also had trouble reaching controllers in Dakar over high-frequency radio. So far, 50 bodies have been recovered from flight 447, as well as an assortment of parts of the plane, including the vertical stabilizer, a bathroom door, parts of the crew rest area and part of a galley. The flight data and cockpit voice recorders have not been located, and officials have said they may never be found since the signals would be faint by now.