After landing on Jersey, my attention was immediately taken by a plane parked near the flying school, half a wing missing. A laminated sheet was attached. Ever the voyeur for accident reports, I couldn’t resist. The pilot had noticed a slight thump shortly after taking off. He checked for anything visibly wrong inside the cockpit…
Read more… 4 Jul 08
Sam Cross was just another PPL student – he needed one more birthday before he could complete his licence but he wasn’t in a rush. He was 16 years old and had flown 15 hours and, in his previous session, he’d gone solo for the first time. His instructor considered him an accomplished pilot. Aircraft…
Read more… 23 Jun 08
Last week we looked at a general aviation crash in which the pilot reported a Mayday as a result of an engine failure. Eight minutes later, the pilot crashed into…
On the 26th of July a single-engine light aircraft crashed in the woods near Colbert, Oklahoma while attempting a forced landing. The pilot had reported his emergency ten minutes earlier…
Thirty years ago, on the 26th of June 1988, a brand new Airbus A320 crashed during a demonstration of its fly-by-wire capabilities, killing three passengers and demolishing the plane as…
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…
I’m in Austria this week, giving a presentation about the representation of old women in science fiction. So it seemed only right to celebrate a woman in aviation who might…
I’ve been working hard on volume two of Without a Trace and, of course, I can’t resist a chapter on Dan Cooper, who successfully hijacked a Northwest Orient aircraft and…
I was browsing around looking for interesting news when I saw that Reddit user justachamelion had posted a great question for /r/AskReddit: Pilots of Reddit, what are the weirdest or…
There are lots of private jets up for sale but this one is special… It is a 1962 Lockheed JetStar 1329. The JetStar was a private project at Lockheed, originally…