Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about the airline industry and aviation safety. This article is more than 10 years old. Anyone watching the news this ...

This recent post and preceding items mention the still-ambiguous mix of data concerning the crash of Air France 447 into the Atlantic six weeks ago. The plane's presence in a tropical thunderstorm was ...

When we hear the words “pitot tube,” we tend to think more of airplanes than of air ducts, but [Franci Kopač]’s guide to pitot tubes for makers shows that they can be a remarkably versatile tool for ...

It's frightening if not ironic to think an invention from the early 1700s could have triggered a chain of events that brought down Air France Flight 447. Pitot tubes that today measure airspeed were ...

Search crews recovered the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of an Air France jetliner that went down in the Atlantic, Brazil's air force said Monday — a key item in finding the cause of the ...

Imagine that you have bought a new car. It’s sleek and loaded with state-of-the-art technology. There is just one drawback. It comes with a caution that under certain and statistically very unlikely ...

Airbus knew since at least 2002 about problems with the type of speed sensor that malfunctioned on an Air France passenger plane that went down in June, the Associated Press has learned. But air ...

(See update below.) The first reaction to news of the crash yesterday over I-287 in New Jersey, in which a married couple in their 40s, their two children, and a friend in his 30s all died (plus a dog ...

Every part of a fighter jet has a job to do. Even the tiny things that don't seem important at first, like that thin metal rod sticking out from the nose in jets like F-16, actually serve a purpose.