The headlines have been full of the story of the Captain of a JetBlue flight who panicked on board and was locked out of the cockpit. In the interests of not arguing with everyone I meet, here is a run-down of what happened, unembellished by media excitements. Let’s get this out of the way first:…
Read more… 30 Mar 12
In 2010, Continental Airlines was convicted of involuntary manslaughter for the Air France Flight 4590 disaster in Paris a decade earlier. Continental called the judgement “absurd” and vowed to appeal. That appeal has now started in Versaille this month. The crash, in July 2000, is described as “the beginning of the end” of Concorde’s commercial…
Read more… 16 Mar 12
If you’ve flown a retractable, you’ve had it drummed into you: put the undercarriage down, check you put the undercarriage down and then check it once on short final. I came close, once. I was doing a circuit to land at North Weald. I wanted to get around quickly and took a decision not to…
Read more… 9 Mar 12
It was an uneventful night. The crew went on duty on Thursday night at 20:40 for scheduled passenger flights on a Boeing 737-800 from Lanzarote to Glasgow and back. Friday morning, on the return leg, their work is almost done. The First Officer is flying and the Captain has taken the opportunity to have a…
Read more… 2 Mar 12
The plane went missing on the 10th of August in 1984. It was a Cessna L-19E “Bird Dog” – a two-seater liaison and observation aircraft built for the US Military. L-19 Crash Documents [The pilot] had been offered a contract by the Colorado Dept. of Forestry to videotape a particularly nasty type of beetle infestation…
Read more… 10 Feb 12
(Before I start, I want to share some exciting news. You Fly Like a Woman appeared in Forbes this week! And it was reviewed – in Dutch and English! – on Aviationbookreviews. I would never have written the book without the support of the blog readers, so here’s a big THANK YOU to all of…
Read more… 3 Feb 12
On the 12th of November 2022, a Bell P-63F Kingcobra fighter flew into a Boeing B-17G Flying Fortress bomber during the Wings Over Dallas airshow. All six crew members in…
On Sunday, the 27th of November 2022, a single-engine aircraft made national US news when it crashed through power lines in Gaithersburg, Maryland, coming to rest on a lattice tower.…
There are a number of reasons why you might need to quickly point out the differences between a General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and a Eurofighter EF2000 Typhoon. You might…
A few days ago (21st of May 2024), Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 encountered heavy turbulence on a passenger flight from London-Heathrow to Singapore. There were 229 on board, including eighteen…
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…
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.…
Mistakes were made. All of them were mine. Before I left for Dresden, I planned out my full itinerary. Berlin is a much busier airport than Tallinn, so I needed…
I’m in Dresden at the moment and I’m afraid I haven’t had a free moment to write you a new article. Luckily, lots of other people are on the internet…