National Transportation Safety Board

Engineer Robert M. Sanchez pulled Metrolink 111 out of the Chatsworth station and was rolling north at 54 mph. About a mile later, he entered a restricted speed zone and throttled down to 42 mph. Just ahead, on his right side, was a red light. It was a warning to stop so that an oncoming Union Pacific freight train could move off the main track and onto a siding.

Wrapping up a baffling case of confusion in the cockpit, federal investigators were only able to speculate Thursday about what spurred two skilled airline pilots to make basic mistakes, then fail to heed warning signs that they were on the wrong runway, causing a deadly accident last summer. What has become clear about the crash of Comair Flight 5191 is that one pilot error compounded another in the early-morning darkness Aug. 27 at Blue Grass Airport in Lexington, Ky.

A small cruise ship that ran aground in May did so under the watch of a 22-year-old navigator fresh out of the California Maritime Academy who had no formal knowledge of Alaska waters and no training on that ship, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board. The riverboat-style Empress of the North hit the submerged portion of a charted rock about 25 miles southwest of Juneau, then drifted a few miles.

An independent federal agency said Tuesday that it is investigating whether safety was compromised when a Palmdale air traffic control center lost radar and radio communications last week. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are interviewing controllers and reviewing data from systems at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center, said Lauren Peduzzi, a spokeswoman for the board.

Airlines should immediately ground dozens of commercial jets with a widely used General Electric engine that in June exploded in a parked Boeing 767 at Los Angeles International Airport and caused a spectacular fire, according to an independent federal safety board that released its report Monday. Although the report does not identify the specific number of planes involved, it recommends inspection of the popular engine series for flaws that could cause an explosion.

The fatal crash of a firefighting air tanker last year in Northern California was caused when the plane's left wingtip struck rugged mountainous terrain during a training mission, not by any structural defects or mechanical error, the National Transportation Safety Board has determined. The plane, a P-3B Orion air tanker operated by Aero Union Corp., crashed after a practice drop of water north of the Chico airport on April 20, 2005. Three crew members died.

A private jet with seven aboard -- including New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez -- slightly overran a runway at Burbank's Bob Hope Airport on Friday and was stopped by a special material designed to keep craft on the airfield, officials said. No one was injured after the Gulfstream landed on the airport's east-west Runway 8, slowed down and then turned into an area covered with a system designed to bring aircraft to a stop, said Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman.

The pilot of a crippled US Airways jetliner made a split-second decision to put down in the Hudson River because trying to return to the airport after birds knocked out both engines could have led to a "catastrophic" crash in a populated neighborhood, he told investigators Saturday. Capt. Chesley B.

Widespread problems with enforcement of the nation's railroad safety rules and sharp differences over what can be done to prevent future accidents have been exposed by the investigation of last year's deadly Metrolink crash in Chatsworth. A long-embraced pillar of train safety -- "efficiency" field testing -- came under fire Wednesday in Washington, D.C., from the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board panel probing the crash that killed 25 and injured 135.

The results are in. After a year's analysis of testimony from the National Transportation Safety Board's first-ever forum on motorcycle safety, the NTSB has finally made its recommendations. The biggest take-away: Helmets save lives. That message wasn't for riders but for state governments, which the safety board is encouraging to adopt universal helmet laws.