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High Altitude Rescue Gone Wrong
In 2015, the Utah Department of Public Safety reported that one of its helicopters nearly crashed during a recovery operation in Draper UT. The NTSB report reference GAA15CA258 and the raw video were released in 2016 but I’ve only just seen this, thanks to the excellent feed of aviation videos run by What You Haven’t…
Read more… 21 Sep 18
Wheel Falls Off For Student Cross-Country Solo
This was initially brought to my attention by Tom Podolec Aviation on Twitter who posted about a Piper PA-28 in distress. The student pilot, a 17-year-old woman named Maggie Taraska, had just taken off when the right main gear fell off the aircraft on departure. Piper PA-28 in distress. Reported as the right main gear…
Read more… 14 Sep 18
Runway Not In Sight at Princess Juliana International
Princess Juliana International Airport handles only about 60,000 aircraft movements a year (compared to almost 500,000 at Heathrow) but it is renowned the world over because of its layout. One end of the 2,000 m/7,000 foot runway (10/28) is very close to Maho Beach and the low approaches are very popular on Youtube. There are…
Read more… 7 Sep 18
Close Call with Hand-Propping
Today’s piece is a guest post by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. I think it’s great that he’s not only willing to learn from his rather frightening experience but happy to share it with the rest of us. Let me preface this by saying that both myself and the plane are fine, the only…
Read more… 31 Aug 18
The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy
I received an interesting Esquire article by email from a reader who thought I would enjoy the detailed story of Swissair Flight 111. Published in 2000, it’s called The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy and is a very emotional and literary description of the crash of Swissair flight 111. Swissair flight 111 was a scheduled…
Read more… 24 Aug 18
Details of the Horizon Air Dash 8 stolen and crashed by employee
On Friday, the 10th of August 2018, Seattle looked on in horror as a de Havilland Dash 8-400 flew what appeared to be aerobatics over the Puget Sound before crashing onto Ketron Island. At about 19:35 local time, the controller at Seattle Tacoma Airport (SEATAC) realised there was an unidentified aircraft on runway 16C. You…
Read more… 17 Aug 18
Accident Analysis
Why KLM Cut the Steering Cables on Two Perfectly Functional Boeing 737s
Last month, we looked at the night of 28th of November 2004 at Barcelona Airport. KLM 1673 ran off the runway at high speed, stopping just short of a canal.…
KLM 1673 Veers Off the Runway with Full Right Rudder
On the 28th of November 2004, a Boeing B737 ran off the runway at Barcelona Airport. The weather had been good at Barcelona that evening. The flight crew agreed to land…
Demystifying
How Important is Having a Sterile Cockpit?
This question was posted to r/flying by a private pilot who wanted to know: do airline pilots ever engage in small talk about irrelevant things during taxiing, run-up, takeoff, and…
Someone has to write the TAF
It turns out that there a person sitting there deciding what the weather is going to do. Which seems obvious, except that I had somehow never asked msyelf who “someone”…
History
The CIA's Shark Screen
Today we have a guest post from the CIA! In their archives, researching something completely different, I found the answer to a question I never thought to ask. I immediately…
The First Jet to Land on an Aircraft Carrier (Deliberately)
“The Vampire was the first jet to land on a moving aircraft carrier deliberately.” This quote from Airshow Luke, our MC at the Legacy of Liberty airshow, made me almost…
Fun Stuff
Bird Strikes, Balloon Landings and Falling in Love with a Boeing 777
The exciting news on Fear of Landing this week was a huge scare about critical vulnerabilities in PHP. PHP is widely used on the web, including in WordPress, which is…
Petrified, Petrified, Petrified
There’s been some interesting reporting in the UK media about a “near disaster” over Canary Wharf involving the captain having to intervene (the horror!) after air data systems failed on…
