On the 20th of February 2021, a Boeing 777-200, flying as United Airlines flight UA328, suffered an engine failure shortly after take off from Denver International Airport for a scheduled domestic flight to Honolulu, Hawaii. There were 229 passengers and ten crew on board. United Airlines was the launch customer for the Boeing 777 when…
Read more… 26 Feb 21
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 what they were unleashing. They used a technique called knolling: a term coined in the 1980s by Andrew Kromelow, a janitor at a furniture making…
Read more… 19 Feb 21
On the 2nd of December 2020, a Boeing 737-500 flying as Air Djibouti flight IV-2065 departed Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, to Garowe, the capital of Puntland (both generally considered to be in Somalia). I have taken the details from the Aircraft Accident Investigation Preliminary Report as hosted on AVHerald. Air Djibouti, previously known as…
Read more… 12 Feb 21
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 your aircraft is going down over water, you were done for. This wasn’t just idle talk. In 1999, Slate’s article In The Event of a…
Read more… 5 Feb 21
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, a two-person, single-engine aircraft popular for training as it has low operating and maintenance costs but, more importantly, it is a durable and forgiving aircraft…
Read more… 29 Jan 21
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 aviation history, when Ivan Smirnov crashlanded on the coast of northwest Australia, losing a cigar box of diamonds in the process. The recording was done…
Read more… 22 Jan 21
The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers.…
On the 7th of December in 1987, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 departed Los Angeles International for a scheduled passenger flight to San Francisco. There were five crew and thirty-eight…
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…
This is a very interesting article by Allen Amsbaugh which was originally published in NASA’s ASRS Directline about the issues of navigational fixes which sound or look similar. The ASRS…
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…
A few months ago, I wrote about how to shoot down a fighter jet while flying it, the case of a test-pilot in a Grumman F-11 Tiger who managed to…
Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial…
Microsoft Flight Simulator has released a new version, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, fourteen years after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The timing couldn’t be better, of course, with…