It seems a good time for something a bit more lighthearted. After weeks of analyzing serious incidents and technical failures, I thought I could a moment to appreciate aviation humuor that actually lands on target (unlike some aircraft that I will decline to mention).

Consider this your in-flight entertainment break. We’ll return to regularly scheduled incidents shortly.

It all started with multiple people sending me this XKCD on reading a METAR earlier this year:

XKCD is famous for its alt text which appears on a hover over; this one is no exception:

“In the aviation world, they don’t use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they’re labeled NOTAM.”

That comic led me to finding his earlier one on people who point lasers at aircraft:

“I still don’t know how the police found my compound where I ran an illegal searchlight depot/covert blimp airfield/fireworks testing range.”

Then I found Rabbit Waves explanation of ground to air signals, which is completely correct but amusingly uses friendly rabbits to show the body movements. The drawings are fantastically clear and I sniggered a bit at “need medical assistance urgently”.

It’s a bit long so please click through to see the whole thing; it’s really well done.

The photograph below is from an accident in Hollister, California in which an antique biplane landed on the runway. But I laughed out loud to see it on Reddit’s Shittyaskflying subreddit with an inventive caption:

Some great comments there too:

Proof you don’t need a retractable to make a gear up landing.

Make sure you tie it down so it doesn’t fall off.

Reminds of a Readers Digest story I read as a kid. Some men at an oil camp in Alaska radio in and say they need a helicopter. Their contact asks why, because they already have a helicopter at their camp. The response was “It won’t fly”. When asked why their helicopter won’t fly, the man said, “I think it won’t fly because it’s under water. But the pilot says it won’t fly because it’s upside down.”

Finally, I laughed way too much at this Aviation Humor collection labelled “Tell me again why I lost my job?”

You’ll need to click through to scroll down the lot. The twenty images are all very wince-worthy and my only complaint is that almost all of them left me wanting to know more about what on earth happened.

That’s enough for today. Back to technical disasters and questionable decisions next week.