Category: Photography

Plane vs Truck

This photograph is so remarkably perfectly timed, I thought it must be a still from an action movie or television series, done with special effects. It turns out it’s absolutely a case of impeccable photography by Mr Robert W Madden, who was at the right place at the right time and managed to frame the…

Read more… 12 Dec 14

Project Habu: Thirty SR-71 Blackbirds in Photographs

The Lockheed SR-71 has broken every speed and altitude record held by aircraft: faster than a speeding bullet and able to fly in the top 1% of our atmosphere. The jet was designed in the 1960s, at the peak of the Cold War, as a reconnaissance jet that could operate at high speeds (Mach 3.5+)…

Read more… 27 Jun 14

The Story Behind an Unbelievable Photograph

A reader mailed me this amazing aviation photograph and I knew I wanted to know more. I was surprised at how much I discovered about the photo, which at first glance I thought might be a fake. But the story of who took the photograph and how he managed to get the shot is a…

Read more… 1 Nov 13

Last Journey of the Endeavour

This week, the space shuttle Endeavour travelled across the U.S. to its final destination of Los Angeles, where it will be on display as a part of the California Science Center. The Endeavour completed 25 missions, spent 299 days in orbit and orbited the Earth 4,671 times while travelling 122,883,151 statute miles. The fleet was…

Read more… 21 Sep 12

Stunning Norwegian Scenery

In June, Christian Semcesen and the other members of his flying club in Oslo, Norway, flew 500 nautical miles from Kjeller Airport (ENKJ) to Bodø (ENBO) for an airshow. The planes: two ex-Norwegian Army Cubs, two Tiger Moths, a PT-19 Cornell and a Chipmunk, Bird Dog, a Broussard and a T-6 Texan. Christian flew the…

Read more… 3 Aug 12

Wish You Were Here (Webcam Roundup)

This video of a frozen plane was posted to reddit and made me shiver: “After a night of freezing rain, this is what we showed up to. Almost an inch of pure ice on almost every surface of the plane. Even the antennas were completely cased in ice.” It struck me because today is a…

Read more… 27 Jan 12

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…