It started on Wednesday evening, around 9pm. Two drones were initially reported flying around Gatwick airport and then directly into the departure and approach areas. Officials responded swiftly, prioritising the safety of the flights by shutting down the airport. Outbound flights were delayed and inbound flights were diverted to other airports, with some flights having…
Read more… 21 Dec 18
Let me warn you up front, the photographs below are not for the easily-made-queasy and bird lovers should probably look away now. On the 9th of December 2018, Precision Air flight 722 suffered multiple bird strikes while on final approach to Mwanza Airport in Tanzania. Precision Air is a Tanzanian airline, established in 1993 as…
Read more… 14 Dec 18
On the 29th of October 2018, Lion Air flight 610, a Boeing 737-8 (MAX) crashed at Tanjung Karawang, West Java after departing from Jakarta. On Wednesday, the KNKT (the Indonesian transport authority) released a preliminary report, based on their findings so far. In order to understand this accident, we need to start with the flight…
Read more… 30 Nov 18
On the 11th of November, an Air Astana ferry flight out of Lisbon almost ended in tragedy. The ATC recordings are almost unbelievable and I recommend listening to the whole thing (audio and transcripts are below but if you are reading this as an email, you may need to click through to the post to…
Read more… 16 Nov 18
This week I took the time to go through all the cases that I have listed as interesting and appropriate as Fear of Landing article. There’s rather a lot of them! So I decided to have a clear out and get rid of some of the pieces that I’m clearly never going to get around…
Read more… 2 Nov 18
In the early hours of the morning, an Air India aircraft struck the airport perimeter wall at Tiruchirappalli International Airport in Tamil Nadu, India. Tiruchirappalli International Airport, commonly referred to as ‘Trichy’, has a 2,480-meter asphalt runway (8,136 feet) which is planned to be extended. The runway is 9/27 and the wall in question is…
Read more… 12 Oct 18
The Anatomy of an A350–CRJ Collision at Atlanta
On the 10th of September 2024, an Airbus A350 took the tail off of a Bombardier CRJ at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, USA. Delta Air Lines flight 295…
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.…
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”…
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…
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…