Aviation safety archive
Explore the causes of aviation accidents and the lessons for safety. Each account traces the events, the investigation findings and the resulting changes to crew training, aircraft design and flight procedures.
Explore the archiveWe distinguish between fatal accidents, serious incidents, hijackings and emergency landings. Our editorial categories do not replace official classifications.
Flight analysis · NTSB DCA09MA026
From the bird strike to touchdown on the water. Select a moment to see how much altitude and time the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 had left.
Based on NTSB DCA09MA026. Key-point times and altitudes come from the investigation. The map uses actual OpenStreetMap geographic data. The flight line is an approximate reconstruction from Figure 1 of the report, not a GPS track; position and altitude between key moments are interpolated.
A shared event database
The filters bring together different outcomes while preserving each event’s official classification.
Found: 100 · Showing: 1–25
The aircraft landed with its landing gear retracted, overran the runway and struck a localiser structure. The reasons for its configuration and the role of a bird strike remain under investigation.
The landing A350 collided with a coastguard aircraft and caught fire. All airliner passengers and crew evacuated, but five people aboard the other aircraft died.
On approach to Pokhara, both propellers feathered after the wrong levers were moved. The aircraft lost thrust and struck the ground.
During cruise, the Boeing 737 entered a nearly vertical descent and struck mountainous terrain. No public final conclusion on the cause is available yet.
An autothrottle malfunction caused increasing asymmetric thrust. The crew noticed the bank late, and the aircraft descended into the sea.
Following a high, unstable approach, the aircraft touched down with the gear retracted, damaging the engines, then went around. Both engines failed on the second approach.
Shortly after takeoff, two air-defence missiles struck the passenger Boeing. Flights had continued during a period of high military tension.
Shortly after takeoff, the aircraft struck birds and lost engine thrust. The crew made a forced landing in a cornfield.
Following a lightning strike and transition to direct control law, the aircraft returned. A hard landing with repeated touchdowns destroyed the landing gear and caused a fire.
A damaged angle-of-attack sensor generated false warnings and MCAS commands. The crew disconnected the trim system but could not restore stable control.
An erroneous angle-of-attack sensor repeatedly triggered nose-down MCAS commands. The crew fought the trim until impact with the sea.
Pitot probe heating was not switched on, causing airspeed indications to diverge. The crew put the aircraft into a rapid descent and did not regain control.
The aircraft departed with fuel almost exactly matching the planned route duration, without mandatory reserves. The engines stopped while holding.
An explosive device destroyed the aircraft shortly after departure from Sharm el-Sheikh. It was the deadliest accident in Russian aviation history.
Alone in the cockpit, the first officer selected a descent and did not open the door for the captain. The aircraft struck a mountainside.
After one engine failed, the crew mistakenly shut down the functioning engine. The aircraft lost speed, clipped a bridge and fell into a river.
An anti-aircraft missile struck the Boeing 777 over an armed conflict zone. The aircraft broke up in flight.
Contact with the Boeing 777 ended over the South China Sea, after which the aircraft changed course. Satellite data indicated a flight towards the southern Indian Ocean, but the main crash site has not been found.
Following an unstable approach, the crew began a go-around, but the aircraft entered a steep dive. The investigation identified serious training and qualification-monitoring deficiencies.
On a visual approach, the aircraft became low and slow relative to the glide path. A late go-around attempt did not prevent its tail from striking the seawall.
The Yak-42 accelerated for much longer than usual and lifted off late. Braking through the pedals and organisational training problems were key factors.
An uncontained engine failure punctured the wing and damaged numerous systems. The crew spent several hours assessing failures before landing the A380 in Singapore.
Contaminated fuel damaged both engines’ metering valves. During approach, one engine remained at high thrust while the other produced almost none.
After pitot tubes iced over, the autopilot disconnected. Conflicting pitch inputs led to a stall that the crew failed to recognise for an extended period.
Airspeed fell on approach and the stick shaker activated, but the captain’s response deepened the stall. The investigation identified training and fatigue problems.
How to read an investigation
An investigation report does not look for a hero or someone to blame. It reconstructs the chain of factors to help prevent the same combination from recurring.
Recorder data, communications, weather, physical evidence and operational records.
What happened to the aircraft and which decisions were made, second by second.
Technology, people, the environment and the organisation are considered together, rather than reduced to a single convenient cause.
Recommendations become training, design changes, procedures and new requirements.
Editorial standards
Fatality and survivor figures are checked against investigation materials. Where an official report is not publicly available, we say so explicitly. Eyewitness accounts are not presented as the investigation commission’s conclusions.
The terms “fatal accident”, “accident”, “serious incident” and “act of unlawful interference” are not interchangeable. We therefore display both the editorial category and the official classification.