Category: NASA
Flying To the Moon!
History was made this week when Artemis II lifted off from Launch Complex 39B at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket roared to life at 18:35 local time on the 1st of April with four on board the spacecraft capsule Orion: three NASA astronauts from the US, and…
Read more… 3 Apr 26
Recognising NASA Technology on Modern Airliners
Today’s guest post is from NASA! OK, it wasn’t written specifically for me but NASA have made it available to educators so I thought I’d give them the opportunity to be highlighted here. This is an exploration of how NASA research has influenced modern airliners through research and technology. What I find fascinating is how…
Read more… 22 Mar 24
The Real “Bionic Man”
Some of you may have spotted the recent comments on Wingless Flight in the M2-F1 by aerospace journalist and author Nigel Macknight, who had written about NASA’s M2-F2 pilot Milt Thomson, whom he knew when he was editing and publishing Space Flight News back in the 1980s. In the article Nigel was commenting on, I…
Read more… 8 May 20
Supersonic Shockwave Interactions
These photographs are from last March but they’ve just been featured in Nature magazine’s collection of the best science images of the year NASA has been exploring the potential of photographic technology resulting in these beautiful air-to-air photographs of supersonic aircraft and how their shockwaves interact. Two T-38 Talon twinjet supersonic jet trainers were flown…
Read more… 24 Jan 20
Accident Analysis
The Anatomy of an A350–CRJ Collision at Atlanta
On the 10th of September 2024, an Airbus A350 took the tail off of a Bombardier CRJ at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, USA. Delta Air Lines flight 295…
Why KLM Cut the Steering Cables on Two Perfectly Functional Boeing 737s
Last month, we looked at the night of 28th of November 2004 at Barcelona Airport. KLM 1673 ran off the runway at high speed, stopping just short of a canal.…
Demystifying
How Important is Having a Sterile Cockpit?
This question was posted to r/flying by a private pilot who wanted to know: do airline pilots ever engage in small talk about irrelevant things during taxiing, run-up, takeoff, and…
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”…
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
Bird Strikes, Balloon Landings and Falling in Love with a Boeing 777
The exciting news on Fear of Landing this week was a huge scare about critical vulnerabilities in PHP. PHP is widely used on the web, including in WordPress, which is…
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…
