The captain of the brand new Lion Air 737-800 that crashed into the sea near Denpasar’s airport in April took control of the jet at an altitude of 150 feet after the junior pilot repeatedly complained he could not see the runway, according to a preliminary report by Indonesia’s air safety authority.

Update This post was based on what has now been admitted by the NTSB to have been a misleading docket. A new post dealing with the NTSB’s dishonest abuse of language and process has been posted here.

  The popular reaction to air safety scares, such as that caused when both Air-India pilots operating a flight allegedly  left the cockpit under the care of flight attendants while they slept in business class last month, is to call for banning the airline involved.

  There is a very disturbing video in circulation of the crash of a 747 freighter shortly after taking of from the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on 29 April killing all seven people on board.

There are airlines that press on regardless and play the roll of the dice when it comes to significant doubts about safety issues, and there are those that say “Not with our passengers.”

This brings aviation to a very unwelcome place. The Boeing 787′s certification is deficient because it doesn’t even meet Boeing’s own standards for the use of lithium-ion technology by the aviation industry at large.

What was in the air freight that caught fire under 117 Singapore Airlines passengers on Monday night when their A330-300 en route from Singapore to Dhaka made an emergency landing at Bangkok?

As expected the FAA has approved the super fix box solution to the battery problems of unknown cause on grounded Boeing 787 Dreamliners, and outlined the steps airlines and other national safety regulators will need to take for flights to resume.

There are consistent reports in the US that the FAA is about to lift the orders that grounded the Dreamliners three months ago after lithium ion battery failures in a Japan Airlines and an All Nippon Airways 787.