I’ve booked a holiday! If the Welsh weather is good enough for the boat to make it across the sound, I’ll be staying on Skokholm Island for a week. There’s no wifi there so I’ve collected my recent favourite articles and videos to keep you busy until my return. I hope you enjoy!

I loved this.

I Learned About Flying From That: Rock ‘N’ Ride | Flying Magazine

Relationships are often defined by shared experiences. So was the case with Loretta and me. When the tower asked if we wanted to declare an emergency, my date’s panicked expression suggested that our future together might require more than a safe landing.

My jaw dropped just watching this. Can’t imagine what it must have been like to be there!

When on a hike to view the carnage a wildfire was taking on my hometown, I caught a fantastic clip of DC-10- dropping fire retardant in a treacherous ridge about to be enveloped in flames. Nobody wanted to come with me because of the steep trail and the inherent dangers of being close to a forest fire, so I was just up there alone. A very unique experience.

On the way up the steep trail, I watched many other planes pass over the burning ridge and drop retardant and water, and I was just hoping I was going to be able to see the DC-10 make its final pass of the day. It circled three times behind a smaller plane and dropped the retardant on the fourth.

This amazing gif on Reddit shows aircraft being routed around storms landing at Hartsfield, which has east-west runways.

It’s great to see how perfectly we’re able to track the weather fronts and keep the aircraft safely away.

More on the Jet Airways flight that landed with almost no fuel left.

DGCA suspends two Jet pilots who landed in seventh attempt with fuel running dangerously low – The Times of India

“The aircraft tried to land in Kochi thrice but due to bad weather, heavy rains and low cloud cover could not do so. Then it diverted to Thiruvananthapuram where also due to bad weather it tried to land three times unsuccessfully. It finally landed there in the fourth attempt — the seventh for the aircraft that morning — with just 270kg fuel left in the aircraft,” said a senior directorate general of civil aviation (DGCA) official.

Key issue: the cited diversion for their original destination was Bengaluru, which had good weather. So it’s not clear why the flight diverted to Thiruvananthapuram in the first place.

Counterpoint to the bad news from last weekend:

In 1939, Franklin Delano Roosevelt designated the anniversary of Orville Wright’s birthday to be National Aviation Day, and every August 19th, aviation enthusiast around the world celebrate flight.

To commemorate this day, the world’s best pilots from the Red Bull Air Race talk about their love for aviation and the shared passion of exploring the world above the ground.

Ouch.

Private aircraft empounded at Plymouth Airport site after landing in bad weather – News – Pilot

The pilot, who was en route from Cornwall to Kent when worsening weather conditions forced him to make the decision to land on the airfield, which still has serviceable runways four years after its closure, was initially told by security guards that he could return to continue his journey once the weather had improved. However, he was subsequently told that he would not be allowed to leave unless it was by road, which could incur considerable expense as the aircraft would have to be dismantled, moved by low loader and then reassembled.

The AAIB have released the Final Report on ET-AOP, the Boeing dreamliner that caught fire at Heathrow while parked.

The ground fire on ET-AOP was initiated by the uncontrolled release of stored energy from the lithium-metal battery in the ELT. It was identified early in the investigation that ELT battery wires, crossed and trapped under the battery compartment cover-plate, probably created a short-circuit current path which could allow a rapid, uncontrolled discharge of the battery. Root Cause testing performed by the aircraft and ELT manufacturers confirmed this latent fault as the most likely cause of the ELT battery fire, most probably in combination with the early depletion of a single cell.

I find boneyards fascinating. Is it just me?

US Military Aviation graveyard. The 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) often called The Boneyard, is the United States Air Force aircraft and missile storage and maintenance facility in Tucson, Arizona, located on Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. AMARG was previously Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center, AMARC, the Military Aircraft Storage and Disposal Center, MASDC, and started life after World War II as the 3040th Aircraft Storage Group.

I’m writing this on Sunday, waiting to see if the weather clears. If you are reading this, it means I’m probably stuck on a small island which is being battered by galeforce winds. Send gin.