Category: History –  Page 10

The Amazing Story of the B-17 Flying Fortress

The 398th was a B-17 bomb group in the 8th Air Force 1st Air Division during World War II. The US Eighth Air Force was the largest of the Army Air Forces, engaged in heavy bombing of enemy targets in France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress was a four-engine heavy…

Read more… 15 Jul 11

15 Years since ValuJet Flight 592

It’s been 15 years since the famous ValuJet crashed into the Everglades, a tragic accident that did much to focus our views on cost-savings and in-flight safety. There’s been a lot of discussion of the flight, including a National Geographic Seconds From Disaster episode. On the 11th of May in 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 disappeared.…

Read more… 13 May 11

The Gimli Glider

On the 23rd of July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 ran out of fuel at FL410 – 26,000 feet halfway through a 2,829 kilometre (1,768 mile) flight from Montreal to Edmonton. The Boeing 767-200 carrying 61 passengers managed to glide to safety to the Gimli Industrial Park Airport in Manitoba, a Canadian prairie province. What…

Read more… 23 Jul 10

The Raisin Bombers of Berlin

Last week, Aviatrix linked to a gallery of photographs in in the Berliner Morgenpost of an emergency landing. You can see all the photographs at full size at Rosinenbomber muss notlanden – Berlin Aktuell – Berliner Morgenpost. The initial photographs in the set were taken by Frank Wandrei and Stefan Schurwanz who were taking photographs…

Read more… 9 Jul 10

D. B. Cooper

The other day, Paul Tocknell from Ask a CFI.com made a throw-away comment on Twitter: Just learned about the D.B. Cooper story. Crazy. As I am easily distracted, I wandered off to find out who D.B. Cooper was and spent the rest of the day reading about the only unsolved hijacking case in the US.…

Read more… 31 Jul 09

Accident Reports

Fatal Seaplane Crash at Oshkosh

The flight crew is often the last safety net when things go wrong, making their failures an easy target for us to point at. After all, if the pilot can…

Never Just One Thing: Air Midwest flight 5481 part 2

Last week, we looked at the weight and balance of Air Midwest 5481, which had been underestimated for a number of different reasons. However, although the aircraft was overweight and…

Demystifying

Maintaining the Stores

We don’t often talk about parked aircraft because it is not very common for them to be involved in crashes. However, one of the side-effects of these pandemic times is…

How Many Successful Ditchings of Commercial Airliners?

When I was learning to fly, I remember someone in the pilots’ bar insisting that all that talk about life jackets under your seat was a waste of time; if…

History

The Last Known Whereabouts of the White Bird

The disappearance of L’Oiseau Blanc in 1927 is one of the enduring mysteries of aviation history. The pilots eventually achieved their goal of changing aviation history, but certainly not in…

The History Listen

I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…

Fun Stuff

The Tetris Challenge

When the Kantonspolizei Zürich (the police department of the Swiss canton of Zurich) posted a photograph on Facebook showing the contents of a standard patrol car, they had no idea…

The History Listen

I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…