On Monday, a cargo loader burst into flames while preparing to load American Airlines flight 192 from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. There’s a lot of embedded video on this post so if you are reading on the mailing list, you might want to click through to the post to view them. #hongKong #americanairlines Cargo…
Read more… 13 Oct 17
I have been working on a collection of aviation mysteries Without a Trace and so, of course, I was immediately interested when I saw that debris from a plane crash had been found sixty years after an aircraft had disappeared. Lieutenant William Thomas Barry Troy enlisted in the Royal Canada Navy in 1947, when he…
Read more… 6 Oct 17
On the 14th of February in 2010, a private jet disappeared from radar in German airspace eleven minutes after taking off for a routine ferry flight from the Czech Republic to Sweden. I wrote a short piece about this accident a few years back but the accident report hadn’t been published yet. Now that I’ve…
Read more… 15 Sep 17
On the 13th of May in 2016, a Seguin Quickie, registration N68TQ, crashed in Mojave, CA. If you don’t recognise the aircraft type, that’s because there’s only one in existence. Or was. The Seguin Quickie was an experimental amateur-built kit plane: a single-seater composite aircraft. It was designed and constructed for air racing by commercial…
Read more… 8 Sep 17
In 1986, I lived on the outskirts of Cerritos, a ‘gateway’ city in the southeast of Los Angeles County. No one outside of California had ever heard of Cerritos, hell, most of California had not heard of Cerritos. When my friends and I were asked where we were from, we tended to just say Los…
Read more… 1 Sep 17
In the early hours on the 8th of January in 2016, a cargo plane was reported missing in northern Sweden. The West Air Bombadier CRJ-200 made a single MAYDAY call at 01:30 before disappearing from radar. A Norwegian Air Force F-16 discovered the crash site on a mountain plateau in Lapland an hour later, northwest…
Read more… 25 Aug 17
Any Landing You Can Float Away From: Successful Ditching in the Arctic
On the 29th of July 2024, a light aircraft encountered engine trouble off the coast of Greenland and was forced to ditch in the North Atlantic. The aircraft was a…
Bomber 139's Third Run: What the Investigation Found
In order to follow this analysis, you’ll need to have the details of the flight and the crash from last week’s article about the flight. When we last saw Bomber…
Another quick round of questions and answers
It’s time for another Questions and Answers session. I started this series a few years back, when a reader asked if there was a way to pose aviation questions outside…
Durga Puja Pandal Shows Air India Flight 171 Crash
The following video from a religious festival in West Bengal, India, has caught a lot of social media attention. It shows a detailed representation of an Air India Boeing Dreamliner…
Gladys Ingle Inflight Wheel Change: Emergency Action or Stunt?
This video of a mid-air wheel exchange goes viral once a year or so, but I never get tired of watching it. Last week, it showed up on Reddit and…
The Disappearance of the Hawaii Clipper May Not Be as Mysterious as Was Thought
This week, we have a guest post by J.B. Rivard who wrote an article for the American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS) and used one of my articles as a reference.…
Aviation Stories You Might Have Missed
I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season. This week, I’ve put together a compilation of interesting items in the press that you might have missed while enjoying…
Nathan Pyle Strange Worlds
Thank you so much for all the kind words. I don’t quite have the wherewithal to respond to each of you individually but I very much appreciate all of you…