In the evening of 6 June 2010 a Boeing 737-4B6 of Royal Air Maroc was en route from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport to its destination of Nador International Airport in Morocco. Flight AT-685 had 156 passengers and four crew members on board. The captain was Pilot Flying, first officer was Pilot Monitoring. Timestamps and actions are…
Read more… 8 Jun 12
A Sukhoi Superjet 100 crashed in Indonesia last Wednesday. As always, there’s been a lot of confusing and conflicting reports in the media, so here is my attempt to document the factual aspects of this terrible accident. The
Read more… 11 May 12
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
Last week I wrote about the Fokker F27 mk 500 Friendship that came off the runway at take-off at Bournemouth Airport. Rudy commented on his experience flying the F27 in…
The flight crew reported for duty at Bournemouth Airport at 3am on Friday the 7th of May 2004. They were flying a thirty-three-year-old Fokker F27 Mark 500, registered in the…
This is not an article that I ever thought I would feel compelled to write! However, given the confusion over a photograph chosen in a regional English paper, apparently it’s…
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…
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.…
It seems a good time for something a bit more lighthearted. After weeks of analyzing serious incidents and technical failures, I thought I could a moment to appreciate aviation humuor…
I’m going to admit that I’m not a great fan of April Fools’ pranks, especially not attempts to trick people into believing something and then pulling the rug out from…