Category: Miscellaneous – Page 26
£50 Cake
It’s disappointing. I had this great idea of flying to various little airfields and compiling a list of the best cakes in southern England. Enstone usually has slices of home-made carrot cake on the counter (next to a tin where you drop in your coins) and North Weald have a coffee shop with the cake-of-the-day…
Read more… 11 Feb 08
Photographing Not Flying
This is a bit of an odd one – I need photographs of “not flying” to go with an article where I complain a lot about winter weather and being grounded. I’ve put together a collection of photographs of rain, cloud and fog: Help me out by telling me which ones you like best. If…
Read more… 3 Feb 08
Cambridge
I was just pondering whether I had anything to write about when I got a research question as a comment – how exciting! Sex Scenes at Starbucks is a speculative fiction writer living in Colorado. She is working on a novel which includes a scene with a jet flying out of Cambridge. She asked me…
Read more… 1 Feb 08
Now that’s what I call a cruise!
Forget the Queen Mary, I want to go cruising on one of these: The brainchild of Jean-Marie Massaud, the Manned Cloud is an airborne hotel that he hopes will change the way we view tourism. Manned Cloud is a hotel with a capacity of 40 passengers and staffed with 15 persons, that on a 3-day…
Read more… 23 Jan 08
The South Downs
Cliff and I had an appointment in Eastbourne, an English resort city right on the South Downs. As always, we arranged to arrive early, so that a delayed or cancelled flight wouldn’t mean chaos. We flew from Málaga to Shoreham via Bordeaux in a single day, so we ended up with plenty of time to…
Read more… 8 Jan 08
Incoming: 2008. I have the traffic in sight.
At the beginning of 2007 I made a really useful list of things to practice when I’m, well, out of practice. And then I never looked it again. I’m once again going through a stretch of not-flying and somehow, this year, I’ve managed to feel particularly out of touch – as if every flight were…
Read more… 31 Dec 07
Accident Analysis
Social Media Influencers Weigh Down Aircraft
The fatal crash at Scottsdale Arizona took place directly after take-off. The passengers were a self-proclaimed crowd of social media influencers. The jet-setting influencer who had organised the flight, had…
Fatal SR22 Stall on Final at Barwick LaFayette
On the 20th of March, 2025, a Cirrus SR22 crashed in LaFayette, Georgia during an instructional flight, killing both the pilot and the flight instructor. It was a good flying…
Demystifying
Someone has to write the TAF
It turns out that there a person sitting there deciding what the weather is going to do. Which seems obvious, except that I had somehow never asked msyelf who “someone”…
The Pilots, the Probes, and the AF447 Verdict
On the 21st of May 2026, the Paris Court of Appeal convicted Airbus and Air France of involuntary manslaughter for their roles in the crash of Air France flight 447,…
History
The CIA's Shark Screen
Today we have a guest post from the CIA! In their archives, researching something completely different, I found the answer to a question I never thought to ask. I immediately…
The First Jet to Land on an Aircraft Carrier (Deliberately)
“The Vampire was the first jet to land on a moving aircraft carrier deliberately.” This quote from Airshow Luke, our MC at the Legacy of Liberty airshow, made me almost…
Fun Stuff
Petrified, Petrified, Petrified
There’s been some interesting reporting in the UK media about a “near disaster” over Canary Wharf involving the captain having to intervene (the horror!) after air data systems failed on…
Aviation Stories You Might Have Missed
I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season. This week, I’ve put together a compilation of interesting items in the press that you might have missed while enjoying…
