On the 2nd of October in 1996, Aeroperú 603 made history with a frantic and heartbreaking 25-minute flight that ended with the loss of the aircraft and all on board. This accident highlighted the importance of the pitot-static system and the effects of spatial disorientation in a way that is hard to over-emphasise. With the…
Read more… 9 Nov 18
Last week, I went through the details of the fatal runway overrun of East Coast Jets flight 81). This is one of those accidents where it seems easy to blame the pilots for not following procedure and then, when it went wrong, making bad decisions. I needed to split the posts in order to have…
Read more… 5 Oct 18
On the 31st of July in 2008, East Coast Jets flight 81 departed Atlantic City International Airport carrying two pilots and six passengers for a non-scheduled domestic passenger flight to Owatonna Degner Regional Airport in Owatonna, Minnesota. Two and a half hours later, they were dead. This crash is interesting to me because at first…
Read more… 28 Sep 18
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
This is a continuation of my analysis of the Malaysian Safety Investigation Report. Last week we looked at the flight details of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, with a focus on the turn back and the response of Air Traffic Control. The detail offered in the report showed that the first turn was almost certainly flown…
Read more… 10 Aug 18
On Monday, the The Malaysian Safety Investigation Team for MH370 released their SAFETY INVESTIGATION REPORT to the public. They have been careful to state that this is not a final report, with the argument that a final report is not possible under the current circumstances, where the victims and the bulk of the wreckage have…
Read more… 3 Aug 18
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…