On the 26th of August 2019, a glider pilot posted a video of him flying his high performance glider at the Aeroplanes Trains and Automobiles event held two days earlier in Spanish Fork, Utah. The glider was a Schleicher ASW-27, a 15-metre sailplane certified in 1997. Designed by Gerhard Waibel, a famous German sailplane designer,…
Read more… 19 Mar 21
I’ve had a soft spot for the Dassault Rafale for a long time; I even included it in a short story under a slightly modified name and description. It’s a French twin-engine fighter which is so crazily agile that it’s aerodynamically unstable; digital fly-by-wire controls keep it under control. Designed to work with aircraft carriers,…
Read more… 29 Mar 19
This is one of my favourite videos ever. I originally posted it in 2009, before YouTube had discovered Kyle Franklin and his flying: There’s a few versions of the Drunken Pilot routine on YouTube now and it remains an airshow favourite. But at the Robins Airshow at Robins Air Force Base in Georgia, Kyle came…
Read more… 27 Mar 15
Since my Tiger Moth flight, I’ve been even more excited about aerobatics that I was before, which really is saying something. It’s pretty neat knowing how it feels to be in the middle of a barrel roll, of course, but also it makes me feel a lot dizzier when watching the pros in action. So…
Read more… 29 Aug 14
The incident happened in 2003 but I only just saw the photograph and video on /r/aviation last week. This looks like a photoshopped picture or a stunt still from of a Hollywood movie but it is 100% legitimate. The photograph was taken at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho, where the Thunderbirds were…
Read more… 9 May 14
I first saw this video of Vicky Benzing performing aerobatics on the Love Air Aviation Blog. What I love about this video is the perspective, that we are right there with Benzing flying the plane, rather than just a view of the plane itself from the ground. Vicky Benzing Aerobatics – What a performance! |…
Read more… 21 Oct 11
Last week, we looked at the sequence of events which led to Flash Airlines flight 604 crashing into the Red Sea a few minutes after take-off. This post assumes you’ve…
On the 3rd of January 2004, Flash Airlines flight 604 crashed into the Red Sea shortly after take-off from Sharm el-Sheikh International in Egypt. The Boeing 737-300 registered in Egypt…
On Monday, two commercial aircraft had a near-miss on the runway at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport in Texas. The airport at Austin has two parallel concrete runways which run north-to-south: 18L/36R…
On the 11th of January 2023, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US stopped all departing commercial flights, grounding aircraft all over the US. Hot on the heels of…
About a week ago, Marléne Aviation posted to Twitter in an attempt to find the oldest video footage of a flight. Marléne Aviation is run by a French aviation history…
On the 7th of December 1957, a Scottish Aviation Twin Pioneer 1, registration G-AOEO, departed an airstrip at Anshan in Libya for a routine flight to Tripoli-Idris Airport. There were…
Long-term readings of Fear of Landing know that my favourite aerobatics show of all time is Kyle Franklin’s Ben Whabnoski Comedy act. Just in case some of you haven’t seen…
I didn’t expect to fall in love with the train. When I planned my trip to Germany, I expected that I would be able to keep up with my normal…