Latest Posts  

Beechcraft Bonanza vs Hangar

New

Today I discovered a YouTube channel called What You Haven’t Seen with quite a bit of background information on a crash that I’ve been reading up on. I’m not ready to write about that one yet but I thought you all might be interested in another video from the channel, posted just yesterday. The text…

Read more… 15 Jun 18

The Wing Just Broke Off: Chalk’s Airline Flight 101 (2005)

On the 19th of December, 2005, Chalk’s Ocean Airways flight 101 crashed into a shipping channel shortly after take-off. This fatal accident signalled the beginning of the end for Chalk’s Ocean Airways. I wrote about the interesting history of Chalk’s Flying Service and the Grumman Mallard previously, which has a few details relevant to this…

Read more… 8 Jun 18

Please Keep Your Feet In The Cockpit At All Times

The subject line on Reddit said Don’t start your airplane with your feet outside the cockpit so as you can imagine, I had to click. And having seen the story behind it, I now have to share it with you. The incident, involving a Piper Cherokee and a parked Cessna 172, took place at Orange…

Read more… 1 Jun 18

Russia Responsible for MH17 Shoot-Down

On the 17th of July in 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down while flying over eastern Ukraine, on a scheduled flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. The aircraft was a Boeing 777-200ER, registration 9M-MRD. There were 15 crew and 283 passengers on board, making this the deadliest airliner shootdown in history. The passengers…

Read more… 25 May 18

Sichuan flight 8633 blown windshield

It seems that physical issues with aircraft are all over the news right now, with the latest being Sichuan Airlines flight 8633. On the 14th of May 2018, Sichuan Airlines flight 8633 departed Chongqing, China for a scheduled passenger flight to Lhasa, the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region (the area of Tibet in the…

Read more… 18 May 18

Chalk’s Flying Service and the Grumman Mallard

Sometimes when I am looking into the background of an accident, I keep finding more and more intriguing details, rabbit holes of interesting information, until I’m barely sure anymore what it was I wanted to know in the first place. It’s well known that commercial aviation got its start in the aftermath of the First…

Read more… 11 May 18

Accident Reports

Aloha Air 243 Becomes Relevant Thirty Years Later

The 28th of April marks 30 years since Aloha Airlines flight 243 had its hull ripped open at 24,000 feet. In light of the current focus on metal fatigue and…

$10,000 Reward for Aircraft Mechanic

This week, the FBI announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man who once worked as a mechanic at SabreTech, the airline maintenance company at…

Demystifying

Drone Killer

When I’m not obsessing about aviation, I write speculative fiction, including science fiction featuring near-future technology. So you can imagine I was pretty excited when I saw a headline last…

Crash in the Desert (Controlled Impact Demonstration)

This post started, as so many of them do, with a seemingly unbelieveable photograph with no attribution information. It didn’t take long to find a Reddit thread discussing the photograph…

History

Goddamned Cat

Sometimes the best stories are the ones that aren’t so famous, where the race was not won and the record was not broken. This is such a story. It’s the…

The Story of the Avro Lancaster LM650 KM-T

I became interested in this story last year, when a reader named Niall left a comment about this rather odd item for sale on Ebay: What was the story of…

Fun Stuff

My Favourite Posts from 2006 to 2017

This week, while I recover from my Holiday Food Coma, I want to try something a little different. I’ve collected my favourite posts from the past – ones that will…

Parachute deployed in flat spin at 1,000 feet

This video was posted to a number of aviation forums last week and it’s easy to see why. I literally watched it three times in a row on the spot…