Category: Crazy

Aircraft Parked at the Pub

This is one of my favourite aviation stories of all time, honestly, just for the headline potential. Man in Australia Arrested for Driving Wingless Plane to Bar Plane Taxied Down Main Street to Newman Pub Fine for man who taxied plane down Newman street and stopped at pub The original incident, which took place in…

Read more… 16 Mar 18

The Amazing Flying Granny

The man in the video is Peter Powell, a British entrepreneur who famously developed steerable kites using dual lines in 1972. He started by selling the kites from the back of his car and then began selling them on Paignton sea front. He had no shop window, he sold them simply by flying the kites…

Read more… 28 Apr 17

Lakeside Ryder Cup Tickets: easy with a seaplane! Or maybe not…

The Ryder Cup is one of the premiere golfing competitions between the US and Europe (originally Great Britain) which is held every other year. This year, the matches were held at the Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minnesota. Hazeltine National Golf Club is a private club and usually closed to guests not accompanied by…

Read more… 9 Dec 16

Mystery Mali Boeing

On the 2nd of November in 2009, a burnt-out Boeing 727 was discovered abandoned in the Saharan desert of Mali in west Africa. The initial reaction was that the Boeing must have crash-landed on this spot but investigators soon discovered that it had landed safely on the make-shift desert airstrip — a dried out lake…

Read more… 18 Nov 16

Cow Takes Down Helicopter

Apologies to those who saw this on Fear of Landing’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, but I know many people only read the blog and I didn’t want anyone to miss it. This is a Robinson R22 Beta which was dragged out of the air by a cow. Well, no, it’s unfair to accuse the cow…

Read more… 23 Sep 16

The Man Who Ate a Cessna

It’s clear by now that I’m obsessively rather interested in planes but not in a weird way. I usually limit myself to considering how they fly, how they look while they are flying, and how they sound when they pass overhead. I’ve never actually considered how they taste. One man did, however. Michel Lotito, a…

Read more… 18 Sep 15

Accident Reports

$10,000 Reward for Aircraft Mechanic

This week, the FBI announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of a man who once worked as a mechanic at SabreTech, the airline maintenance company at…

Land Like a Crow part 2

Last week, I covered the sequence of events that led to a Boeing 767-300 ER wheels-up landing at Warsaw airport. A hydraulic hose connecting the hydraulic system on the right…

Demystifying

Crash in the Desert (Controlled Impact Demonstration)

This post started, as so many of them do, with a seemingly unbelieveable photograph with no attribution information. It didn’t take long to find a Reddit thread discussing the photograph…

The 1% rule and air disaster avoidance

I asked my friend, Robert Dawson, to help me understand the numbers behind risk assessment and the 1% rule. Robert writes fantastic science fiction and poetry, however I contacted him…

History

Goddamned Cat

Sometimes the best stories are the ones that aren’t so famous, where the race was not won and the record was not broken. This is such a story. It’s the…

The Story of the Avro Lancaster LM650 KM-T

I became interested in this story last year, when a reader named Niall left a comment about this rather odd item for sale on Ebay: What was the story of…

Fun Stuff

My Favourite Posts from 2006 to 2017

This week, while I recover from my Holiday Food Coma, I want to try something a little different. I’ve collected my favourite posts from the past – ones that will…

Parachute deployed in flat spin at 1,000 feet

This video was posted to a number of aviation forums last week and it’s easy to see why. I literally watched it three times in a row on the spot…