Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why does the cookie warning pop up all times?

The new European Law General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires webmasters to ensure visitors consented to using cookies before sending cookies. To remember the users choice however cookies are needed - as such the law achieves the exact opposite of what was intended, while the law ignores the possibilities already available at browsers. You will need to enable persistent/permanent cookies on your browser so that avherald.com can remember your selection on your next visit. Session only cookies will work within one visit but will be forgotten next time you visit.

Q: What incidents and accidents does The Aviation Herald report?

The Aviation Herald concentrates on "Air Transport", meaning in general The Aviation Herald will report only about commercial flights or commercial operators involving airplanes with capacity for 19 passenger seats or more.
Incidents will be reported only during active flights from entering the takeoff runway to leaving the landing runway, other incidents at the gate or during taxi are summarily dismissed.
Accidents involving commercial flights with capacity of 19 or more seats are reported as soon as The Aviation Herald gets to know about them.

Q: What do the classifications Crash, Accident, Incident, News or Report mean?

Report indicates an articles about the release and contents of an official incident or accident investigation report, both preliminary and final, where The Aviation Herald did not report the original event. If The Aviation Herald did report the original event, the original article (series) will be updated and the investigation reports mentioned and linked in there.
News indicates an article about commercial aviation events, that are not related to an occurrence (incident, accident, crash) or an active flight (a flight is active from entering its takeoff runway to leaving its landing runway).
Incident marks any safety relevant event out of the ordinary during flight (from the first human with the intention to fly boarding the aircraft to last human with intention to fly leaving the aircraft), that causes no injuries or death to any people and causes only limited damage (exception: the engines of an aircraft may suffer even catastrophic damage in an incident).
Accident marks an incident, that has caused injuries or death to humans or caused significant damage.
Crash marks an accident, that is potentially catastrophic (has the potential to kill everybody on board of an airplane).

Q: I am missing entries in the list/no event update occurs for a long time (more than a day)?

Check the filters in the top menu bar. The C,A,I,N and R letters need to be black, not greyed out, so that the associated events are being listed. If any of those filters is deactivated (greyed out), simply click on the filter to reactivate the display of associated items.

Q: How does the search function work?

The search function on The Aviation Herald searches for inclusion and exclusion strings. Matches are not limited to whole words only, but may be part of words as well. A leading + (which may be omitted) indicates a pattern, that needs to be present in the article for a match, a leading - marks a string, that must not be present in an article for a match.
For example, the search term "B77 engine" (excluding the quotation marks) find all articles about Boeing 777s (all types), that had some issue with an engine. The search term "B744 -United" (excluding quotation marks) finds all events about Boeing 747-400s, however will not show any such event involving United Airlines.
The search function still adheres to the filter for crashes, accidents, ... and shows the matches in the selected order, either by update or occurence.
A combination of multiple terms as part of a phrase, that must appear in the articles exactly as typed in in the search, need to be enclosed in quotation marks, e.g. to search for a specific date use e.g. "May 16th 2019" (including the quotation marks) or a specific combination of words, e.g. "tail strike" (including the quotation marks).
Other than the list of events (which only shows the most recent article if sorted by update or only the initial report if sorted by occurence), the search will also show multiple articles of an event.

Q: Why do parts of airline names like Air, Airline, Airways, Aer, ... not get used in the headlines?

Headlines are kept as short as possible without losing information. Airline Name parts like Air, Aer, Airline, Airways, ... are therefore being omitted where the airline is unambiguously being identified nonetheless. Such parts of the airline names are used only where a potential confusion with another airline exists.

Q: Why do aircraft types like BCS3, ATR-72-212A etc. follow technical and not marketing nomenclature?

Following marketing nomenclature has caused severe problems in the past, the Aviation Herald therefore follows only the technical nomenclature. ATR-72-500 and ATR-72-600 are both -212A technically, the Airbus A220 has been designed and is still being built by Bombardier and therefore is and remains the Bombardier C-Series technically.

Q: Why do you use "wrong" abbreviations (e.g. for New South Wales)?

We use the original ISO 3166 standard (two letter code) to remain compatible with other sources. Therefore the abbreviation for e.g. New South Wales is NS unlike the postal abbreviation NSW.

Q: How does The Aviation Herald compile their articles?

Our articles are always based on own research. We require at least two independent agreeing information flows unless we can base our report on an official source. But even information provided by official sources like accident investigation units, airlines, airports and similiar do get cross checked with available flight data. "Errare humanum est." And we do hope to deal with humans, not robots!

Q: Do links to external sources mean, the report by The Aviation Herald is purely based on that source?

No. Articles by The Aviation Herald are always based on minimum two independent (inofficial) sources or on an official source. Links to external sources may indicate one or both of the following: we may have first gotten knowledge of the event via that source and started research into the event thereafter or the source may contain additional interesting details that we can not verify/are outside the scope of our reporting.

Q: Why do you issue editorial notes regarding the use of non-English language for final reports?

We are well aware of the ICAO languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) and them being permitted by ICAO for the final reports.

However, almost nobody is capable of reading/understanding all the ICAO languages without a good translator. Yet, every (international) aviator around the planet is capable of understanding English besides his local language, hence the only common language to all aviators around the planet is English. As the aim of these reports is to avoid repeats of occurrences for the same reasons, the only real choice to achieve this, is to publish the reports in English so that everybody can learn and benefit from the reports.

This is for ICAO to remove the burden of such efforts by having the investigation bodies, all of which speak English anyway, to write their reports in English. Right now, every (of the thousands if not millions) aviator would either need to be able to speak these six languages or need to involve a costly paid translator while trying to learn the lessons of previous occurrences. So saving that (perhaps single translation) effort on the publishing side provokes huge effort with EVERY single reader and produces huge cost, or would leave the lessons not (correctly) understood or not being seen at all.

Q: Can we take information from articles of The Aviation Herald and publish on our website?

If you purchase a subscription, you are allowed to republish any textual information provided by our articles during your subscription period in any form within your publication - you are allowed to copy and paste our articles onto your website/newspaper/magazine - provided you credit The Aviation Herald properly by providing a link to our original article.

Without subscription you can use information provided in our articles for your private purposes, but you are not allowed to republish the information in any form (exception: to illustrate an argument user posts on bulletin boards may use small quotes with proper credit and link to our original article even without subscription).