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 Sukhoi Superjet 100 is a fly-by-wire short-to-medium range jet with capacity for 75-98 passengers. The jetliner was…
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
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
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…
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 Pilots, the Probes, and the AF447 Verdict
On the 21st of May 2026, the Paris Court of Appeal convicted Airbus and Air France of involuntary manslaughter for their roles in the crash of Air France flight 447,…
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…
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…
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…