Category: Accidents and Incidents – Page 34
Final Report: Convair Crash at Wonderboom, Pretoria
Last year, I wrote about the fatal Convair Crash at Pretoria which took place in June 2018. The final report came out in August which gives a lot more information than we had at the time. Convair was an American aircraft manufacturing company best known for its military aircraft, including the B-36 Peacemaker and the…
Read more… 4 Oct 19
NTSB Summary: Assumptions Can Be Fatal
Yesterday the NTSB released a Safety Recommendation Report regarding the recent Boeing 737 MAX crashes and subsequent grounding of the aircraft. I am particularly interested in this report in the aftermath of two in-depth articles that came out recently. The New York Times published William Langeweische’s What Really Brought Down the Boeing 737 Max. As…
Read more… 27 Sep 19
Draco Written Off
One of the big events of the aviation calendar is the STOL competition which takes place every May in Valdez, Alaska. I wrote about the 2019 Valdez Fly In and STOL Competition a few months ago, specifically about an amazing home-built “bush plane” named Draco: The STOL competition was broadcast live and you can watch…
Read more… 20 Sep 19
Size Matters
This morning, I woke up to headlines about spilling coffee in the cockpit (thank you R and Mom) and so of course I had to find out what happened. The case was released yesterday in the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch S2/2019 Special along with a number of other interesting incidents. The incident in question…
Read more… 13 Sep 19
Fire Fighting and Rising Terrain
The following clip was posted to Twitter on the 13th of August. Oh F*** pic.twitter.com/235hlKFAHr — Aviões e Músicas (@avioesemusicas) August 13, 2019 The video shows a small four-engine jet coming in low to drop fire retardant and then climbing away over a low ridge, flying so close to the rising terrain that the aircraft…
Read more… 30 Aug 19
Three Cheeseburgers and a Rental Car
Aircraft hijacks are pretty rare since airport security started checking bags before allowing them on the flight. However, I was intrigued by the story of Glenn Kurt Tripp who appeared to attempt a DB Cooper style hijack in 1980 and then again in 1983, at the end of which he was shot and killed by…
Read more… 26 Jul 19
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…
