Category: Miscellaneous

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

Some Jokes Are Not That Funny

I originally saw the headline on BBC news: Southwest Airlines pilots livestreamed plane toilet on hidden camera. A Southwest Airlines flight attendant has filed a lawsuit accusing two pilots of livestreaming a plane’s toilet on hidden camera. The cabin crew member had been asked to the flight deck while the captain used the lavatory, standard…

Read more… 8 Nov 19

We’re Still Talking about the 737 Max 8

The entire aviation world is focused on the Boeing 737 Max 8, especially as the details from the Lion Air cockpit voice recorder files have been leaked. The truth is, I don’t have a lot to say about it at this stage (unlike me to keep quiet, I know!) and so instead, I’ve put together…

Read more… 22 Mar 19

Accident Reports

Explosive Decompression on the Ground

The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers.…

I am the problem: PSA flight 1771

On the 7th of December in 1987, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 departed Los Angeles International for a scheduled passenger flight to San Francisco. There were five crew and thirty-eight…

Demystifying

Small Plane Gets Stoned

This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…

How do you pronounce…?

This is a very interesting article by Allen Amsbaugh which was originally published in NASA’s ASRS Directline about the issues of navigational fixes which sound or look similar. The ASRS…

History

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…

The Last Flight of B121-120

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…

Fun Stuff

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…

Jetpacks and Wingwalking: 2020 keeps getting weirder

Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial…