NTSB’s Michael Graham Weighs In on Key Safety Issues

NTSB Vice Chairman Michael Graham, elevated to the board's second-highest position by President Trump in April 2026, brings a credentials profile that is unusual even by NTSB standards: a Navy fighter pilot background, a decade-plus leading safety operations at Textron Aviation across the Cessna, Hawker, and Beechcraft product lines, 10,000 flight hours, and type ratings in six Citation variants. That combination of military precision culture, OEM-level institutional knowledge, and operational line experience shapes the substantive weight behind his public statements on business aviation safety, and it positions him as one of the more practically credentialed voices on the board when addressing the specific failure modes that kill professional crews in turbine aircraft.

The most operationally urgent thread in Graham's recent remarks concerns post-maintenance stall testing, a niche but high-lethality segment of business aviation flight operations. The NTSB's investigations into a 2024 Hawker 900XP fatal accident and a 2025 Hawker 800XP fatal accident produced a finding that is both sobering and instructive: the crews in both cases were fully qualified to operate their aircraft in line service, yet they were killed during test profiles that their training had not prepared them to survive. The specific hazard Graham identifies is the Hawker wing's acute sensitivity to minor surface discontinuities — ridges in leading-edge sealant, visually imperceptible light ice — that can advance a stall ahead of stick shaker or stick pusher activation, eliminating the warning margin on which crews normally depend. The NTSB's urgent recommendation to NBAA to communicate this to operators reflects a recognition that the Part 91 and Part 135 maintenance community does not consistently route these flights to pilots with dedicated stall-test qualification, a gap that has now produced two fatal outcomes in consecutive years on the same aircraft family.

Graham's broader commentary on loss of control inflight, runway excursions, and controlled flight into terrain covers terrain the NTSB has mapped repeatedly, but his framing carries specific regulatory texture that operators should register. On LOC-I, he references the 2007 Marlin Air accident near Milwaukee — a Part 135 flight that killed six — as the event that drove the NTSB's long-standing recommendation for the FAA to mandate upset recovery training in Part 135 curricula. That recommendation remains open, meaning the FAA has not acted on it, and Graham's public reiteration of it in May 2026 signals continued board pressure on the agency. For operators flying under Parts 91, 91K, or 135 who have not yet embedded upset prevention and recovery training into their recurrent programs, the message is that the NTSB views voluntary adoption as the responsible path while regulatory action remains pending. On runway excursions, Graham identifies the failure to establish and maintain a stabilized approach as the dominant causal thread, a finding consistent with two decades of accident data and one that applies without meaningful distinction across aircraft type, crew experience level, or operating rule.

The connective tissue across all three safety categories Graham addresses is a consistent institutional frustration: the tools to mitigate these accidents exist, are widely documented, and are frequently underutilized. Upset recovery training is commercially available and widely endorsed. Stabilized approach criteria are codified in every major operator SOP framework. Post-maintenance stall tests are a known elevated-risk operation with a clear mitigation path — route them to qualified test pilots. Graham's commentary, filtered through his Textron-era experience building SMS infrastructure for a major OEM, reflects an operator-side understanding that safety systems only function when they are actually implemented rather than merely documented. His reference to Navy aviation culture — post-flight debriefs, peer feedback, ego-free self-critique — as a model for general and business aviation suggests that the cultural substrate enabling effective use of safety tools remains the harder and less-resolved problem for the civilian sector.

For flight departments operating Hawker variants specifically, the post-maintenance stall test guidance constitutes an immediate operational consideration requiring review of current test-flight procedures and pilot qualification standards. More broadly, Graham's remarks reinforce a direction of travel in NTSB oversight that is increasingly focused on the gap between regulatory compliance and actual safety competency — a distinction that matters particularly for Part 91 operators, who carry fewer mandated training requirements and must therefore exercise greater self-directed judgment about where elevated risk warrants elevated preparation.