Category: Miscellaneous

For Your Entertainment

I’m clearing out my inbox once again and found a number of links that I think you will enjoy. Mayday, mayday, we have a delivery for you. I was bemused to see this fly past on Twitter (and grateful that the person included a source; I wish everyone did this!) Today I learned that Iran's…

Read more… 30 Apr 21

Disaster Recovery: Fear of Landing

In the early hours of Wednesday the 10th of March, a fire broke out at the OVH data centre in Strasbourg. The fire started in a room in the building known as SBG2 just before 01:00 local time. All services in all four buildings (SGB1, SGB2, SGB3 and SGB4) were halted while SGB2 blazed with…

Read more… 12 Mar 21

The Most Popular Posts in 2020

Every year I take a look at the most popular posts of the year, by which I mean the posts most read in that year, regardless of when they were posted. Intriguingly, this year it was a number of older posts that attracted the most attention, possibly a result of the world having much more…

Read more… 1 Jan 21

A Very Merry Christmas

It’s Christmas day and I’m taking the day off! Wishing everyone one of you all the best at the end of 2020 (thank goodness!) and hoping for a much improved 2021! Here are some pieces I found online, just because I can’t bear to leave you without something to read: A B-17 deployed to drop…

Read more… 25 Dec 20

COVID-19 Effects on Aviation

It’s hard to have a conversation about anything but the Coronavirus at the moment. There is so much information and misinformation being shared right now. It reminds me of the situation directly after a commercial crash, where everyone desperately wants to know what happened and why, even though not a lot of solid information is…

Read more… 13 Mar 20

Seasonal Greetings from Fear of Landing

I’m pretty sure it’s a tradition now that I get the Friday before Christmas off. At least, I hope so, because I’ve got some kind of horrible sniffly-sneezy-coughing-possibly-dying thing and I just do not have enough brain to finish the piece I have been working on. So I’m going back to bed and feeling sorry…

Read more… 20 Dec 19

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…