Pilot Bathroom Breaks: The Latest Air-Safety Issue?

In just three seconds, a hijacker could take over a plane. How? By waiting for the pilot to go to the bathroom. Unlike recent airline passengers like actor...

Sky-High Standards

Transport officials at the European Union are so worked up over recent plane crashes in Greece and Venezuela, which killed 281 people, that they are considering...

DOES AIR SAFETY HAVE A PRICE?

Every time a commercial airliner meets up with disaster, the flying public is forced to confront dangers it never even knew existed--remember microbursts and...

Air Safety: A Bump in the Sky

When USAir Flight 427 plunged from the sky on Sept. 8, none of the 127 passengers or five crew members survived to help explain what might have triggered the...

Air Safety: Under a Cloud

When Dawn O'Day, a New York homemaker, saw a TV report last week on commuter- airline safety, she got worried -- and then she got on the phone. Her daughter...

Heavy Clouds In the Lavatory

U.S. and Canadian air-safety experts are comparing notes on the often dangerous ways cigarette addicts try to foil lavatory smoke detectors. Smokers frequently...

A Letter From The Publisher, Apr. 11, 1977

When an airline accident occurs, almost anywhere in the world, air-safety teams rush to the scene to begin a painstaking effort to establish the cause—and, where...

A Letter From the Publisher: Jan. 12, 1987

TIME's beat is the entire world, and it naturally follows that our correspondents are among the airlines' steadiest customers. In view of this week's cover story...

Science: Plea for Overhauling the FAA

A blue-ribbon panel finds air-safety agency short on skills Major plane accidents sometimes seem to be the only way to force reforms in air safety. The crash...

Air Safety: Delightful Destruction

A four-engined Douglas DC-7 skimmed at 140 m.p.h. across the desert sands near Phoenix, Ariz., clipped a pile of railroad ties that sheared off its propellers...