Aviation Videos and Articles for August
I always collect videos and links that I think you might enjoy but apparently, I have been neglecting to actually share them with you! So here’s a “best of the best”, the top videos and a few articles from the stack of links that’s been gathering dust on my desktop all year.
This one has actually been on my list since March, so I hope everyone hasn’t seen it already. London’s Gatwick Airport re-opened after having been closed for eighteen months. Tom Scott went to South Terminal to find out what was involved.
Spreaking of Gatwick, I was fascinated by The History of Gatwick Airport from 1241AD to 1958. Often, we start with the first aircraft at an airport but the land that Gatwick Airport is situated on has a much longer and interesting history.
Having found a few photos of Gatwick’s Beehive I decided to put together a feature page on the Beehive. It was not long before it had become a much bigger project and encompassed the origins of Gatwick from how the land was acquired in the year 1241AD through to 1956 and the opening of the current airport we know today…….with the Beehive set in amongst that.
This low landing at Skiathos is making the rounds but what I find particularly interesting is that the video includes the same landing from a number of different angles, which reduces the effect of a skewed perspective. The poster asks if the landing is lower than the now-famous Air Italy 737-800 approach, which is included at the end.
Iain sent me this great article about the wreckage of a ‘plane crash on an uninhabited island in Scotland.
This was the scene of an attempt by RAF Kinloss Mountain Rescue Team in 1978 to try to locate a crash site that was reputed to be on the small inaccessible Island. The team had a few epics including and overnight stay in wild weather, where tents were smashed by the winds in the exposed cliffs. This was all done by Sea Kings helicopters and there are a few tales of these trips.
I’ve featured dashcam video of small aircraft landing on the street before but this one, of an emergency landing in Swain County, is particularly interesting to me because it is from the pilot’s viewpoint and includes the live audio. I think the pilot did a great job.
It wouldn’t normally occur to me to link to Wikipedia, but this list of Paper planes launched from space tickled me, especially as the answer appears to be “zero”.
As the Japanese/JAXA project was outlined, scientists would have had no way to track the airplanes or to predict where they might land; and as 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered in water, the craft would have anticipated a wet reunion with the planet. Each plane, however, would have borne a request in several languages asking its finder to contact the Japanese team. Should one of the airplanes thus have made its way home, its journey would have helped to demonstrate the feasibility of slow-speed, low-friction atmospheric reentry. Critics have suggested that even a successful demonstration would lack probative impact beyond the realm of diminutive sheets of folded paper—they can only fall.7(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_planes_launched_from_space#cite_note-7) Supporters countered that the broadening of knowledge was justification enough.
I was deeply amused to see this described as “a hit and run at JFK airport”. It does seem to have been rather chaotic. The YouTube channel You can see ATC has created a video reconstruction to make it easier to follow the ATC.
And speaking of aircraft behaving badly, what about the poor tug that got runover by an American Airlines flight at La Guardia? This happened at La Guardia on the 4th of August but according to local media, the driver was rescued unharmed.
Finally, I couldn’t help but hold my breath while watching this Boeing 777X appear to climb much too steeply for an airliner. The footage is from the 2022 Farnborough air show last month.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s compilation and I’ll try not to wait so long before publishing the next collection!
The “history of Gatwick” link was especially good reading., Thanks
Very interesting!
Great stuff Sylvia. I wish we could see a cockpit cam for the last flight, it’s hard to believe there weren’t alarms going off.
Excellent as usual, thanks for a good read.
The 777X appears to have a thrust:weight of about 0.5 when set up to perform that kind of stunt with no payload and minimal fuel, so it isn’t surprising it can do unexpected things.
Quite a collection of links.
I wonder why Gatwick closed the South Terminal, which is closer to the runway, rather than the North Terminal
The history is interesting; one has the impression of the airport gradually elbowing out other uses of the land. (One is also reminded of Douglas Adams’s definition of “Aird of Sleat” as ~”the ancient Scottish curse on the ground now occupied by Heathrow.”)