Category: Crazy – Page 6
Homemade Gyro-Rocket-Copter Thing
When I first saw the reference to “Insane Homebrew Rocket” I really wasn’t sure what to expect. I’m still not sure what to think. I have to concede that it flies but I’m really not sure what to class the contraption as. A rocket-copter? One YouTube commenter calls it an orbital launch vehicle with an…
Read more… 13 Feb 15
I’m on Television on Monday!
Last autumn, I received an interesting email from a woman researching an aircraft accident. She’d read my post on Northwest Flight 188 (the pilots who flew straight past their destination) and wanted to ask my opinion about the incident and how it compared to the Air India Express last year. I started to mail back…
Read more… 24 Feb 12
How to Drown a Jet
I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today and then I saw this unbelievable video posted on Golf Hotel Whiskey entitled Amazing video of how NOT to land a Cessna Citation 2. Although the incident was over five years ago, I’d never seen it before. The Citation, OY-JET, was coming into Atlantic…
Read more… 22 Jul 11
Accident Analysis
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…
Demystifying
How Important is Having a Sterile Cockpit?
This question was posted to r/flying by a private pilot who wanted to know: do airline pilots ever engage in small talk about irrelevant things during taxiing, run-up, takeoff, and…
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”…
History
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…
Fun Stuff
Bird Strikes, Balloon Landings and Falling in Love with a Boeing 777
The exciting news on Fear of Landing this week was a huge scare about critical vulnerabilities in PHP. PHP is widely used on the web, including in WordPress, which is…
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…
