I’ve lost most of the day to unexpected research and one of the fascinating items that I discovered was the Air Force Historical Research Agency and their amazing photo collection. This collection includes a thousand old photographs of flight! I was drawn in by some of these of the Wright brothers and their aircraft, many…
Read more… 28 Jul 23
On the 21st of November 1956, the M-200 Myest (Месть, meaning vengeance or revenge) collided with a Russian destroyer and sunk to the bottom of the Baltic. The M-200 Myest was a Malyutka-class small torpedo submarine of the XV series, built in Leningrad in 1940. The XV series was an extended version with six watertight…
Read more… 23 Jun 23
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 enthusiast. They posted a video of the Archdeacon-Voisin hydro-planeur test on the Seine along with the request. Do you know of a film of an…
Read more… 17 Sep 22
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 two crew and four passengers on board, including David McKintyre, the co-founder of Scottish Aviation Limited. They never arrived. The Twin Pioneer was the most…
Read more… 1 Jul 22
While researching another subject, I discovered this accident report from 1956 which I just had to share with you. Normally, an aviation accident investigation is done by a group of experts who must come together to create a report of their findings and analyses. A good report is informative and clear in its conclusions; to…
Read more… 27 May 22
When I first saw this image, I assumed it was result of modern image manipulations, maybe even the poster for a film. It was too perfect and too modern to be what it claimed to be, which was a historical photograph of an aircraft over Edinburgh. I was half right. it is a composite photograph…
Read more… 18 Mar 22
On the 27th of July 2018, an experienced pilot departed with ten parachutists on board for a routine drop mission. It was the pilot’s fourth flight of the day in…
You may remember this 2010 incident from Aviation Herald’s great reporting which led to international attention to the case. I wrote about Aviation Herald’s work on this in: 83ft above…
With no moon or city lights to guide you, the runway lights up ahead should be a beacon of safety. However, it might be a trap known as the black…
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 28th of November 1979, a sight-seeing flight to Antartica crashed into Mount Erebus, killing all 257 on board. The Mount Erebus Disaster, as it came to be known,…
I have a guest post this week by Nicholas Brown, the Campus President of Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology. The college has been rebuilding a replica of Little Stinker,…
I’m in Dresden at the moment and I’m afraid I haven’t had a free moment to write you a new article. Luckily, lots of other people are on the internet…
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…