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, is famous not just for the tragic accident, New Zealand’s worst peacetime disaster, but also because the final accident report’s conclusion was overturned within a…
Read more… 20 Aug 21
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, the Pitts Special flown by Betty Skelton. I’ll let Nicholas tell you all about it but first I wanted to share this video from an…
Read more… 25 Jun 21
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 way that they had hoped. It has only just come to my attention that I haven’t written about this mystery here, so I hope…
Read more… 21 May 21
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 aviation history, when Ivan Smirnov crashlanded on the coast of northwest Australia, losing a cigar box of diamonds in the process. The recording was done…
Read more… 22 Jan 21
The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as a replacement for aging Tiger Moths and Pipers; Beagle Aircraft Limited marketed it as “a pilot’s aeroplane”. I found the designation B.121 interesting. B stands…
Read more… 6 Nov 20
A few months ago, I wrote about how to shoot down a fighter jet while flying it, the case of a test-pilot in a Grumman F-11 Tiger who managed to catch up to his own gunfire. One of the fantastic things I found out in the course of writing that piece was that Tom Attridge…
Read more… 23 Oct 20
On the 20th of February 2021, United Airlines flight 328 made international headlines when a fan blade separated from the right engine shortly after take-off. Flight UA328 was a scheduled…
It was an overcast day on the morning of the 8th of September 2011 when people in West Liberty, Ohio, heard the sounds of a low-flying aircraft approaching. The Cirrus…
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…
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.…
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…
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…