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The Weight and Balance of Air Midwest 5481

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Air Midwest, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, was originally certified as an air carrier by the FAA in 1965. The airline originally consisted of a single Cessna 206, which transported human remains for area mortuaries. In 1968, the company began to provide a passenger service (for live passengers). The Mesa Air Group acquired the company in…

Read more… 16 Apr 21

Weight and Balance: How Much Do You Weigh, Miss?

A number of airlines suspended operations during the worst of the pandemic that has disrupted the world over the past year. One of these, a British charter airline owned by a German-Anglo travel and tourism company, were in the process of upgrading their systems, including their reservation software, when the pandemic hit. The integrated check-in…

Read more… 9 Apr 21

Lion Air flight 610 : The Previous Flight

We have explored the aircraft registered as PK-LQP in quite some detail, looking at the sequence of events leading up to the crash of Lion Air flight 610. The Maintenance The Faulty AOA Sensor The AOA Disagree Alert These pieces explore how the aircraft went into service with a faulty AOA sensor. It also shows…

Read more… 2 Apr 21

Pitch-up Illusion on Take-Off

On the 28th of April 2017, a single-engine turbo-prop flying at night under instruments crashed near Amarillo International Airport in Texas. The accident report had been available on the app.ntsb.gov site but appears to have been removed. You can download a copy using the CAROL query tool for the NTSB number CEN17FA168. This piece was…

Read more… 26 Mar 21

Impromptu Airshow

On the 26th of August 2019, a glider pilot posted a video of him flying his high performance glider at the Aeroplanes Trains and Automobiles event held two days earlier in Spanish Fork, Utah. The glider was a Schleicher ASW-27, a 15-metre sailplane certified in 1997. Designed by Gerhard Waibel, a famous German sailplane designer,…

Read more… 19 Mar 21

Disaster Recovery: Fear of Landing

In the early hours of Wednesday the 10th of March, a fire broke out at the OVH data centre in Strasbourg. The fire started in a room in the building known as SBG2 just before 01:00 local time. All services in all four buildings (SGB1, SGB2, SGB3 and SGB4) were halted while SGB2 blazed with…

Read more… 12 Mar 21

Accident Reports

Boeing 737 Runway Excursion at Kathmandu

On the 19th of April 2018, a Malinda Air scheduled passenger flight from Kathmandu to Kuala Lumpur rejected take-off and overran the runway. The Malaysian Ministry of Transport investigated and…

A Lesson On Keeping The Aircraft in Trim

On the 28th of May 2019, a customer arrived at a flight school at Archerfield Airport, Queensland for their first flight experience. The aircraft that day was a Cessna 152,…

Demystifying

How Many Successful Ditchings of Commercial Airliners?

When I was learning to fly, I remember someone in the pilots’ bar insisting that all that talk about life jackets under your seat was a waste of time; if…

Small Plane Gets Stoned

This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…

History

The History Listen

I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…

The Last Flight of B121-120

The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…

Fun Stuff

The Tetris Challenge

When the Kantonspolizei Zürich (the police department of the Swiss canton of Zurich) posted a photograph on Facebook showing the contents of a standard patrol car, they had no idea…

The History Listen

I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…