It seems like a good time for a bit of lightness as a break from fatal crashes. Luckily, I have just the thing: some reader contributions along with a personal story.

Neil of AirC Images mailed me with this amazing photograph and video of his father. This is Neil’s dad Cornell as a young boy with his siblings (Betty, Virginia and Tom).

Cornell was drafted into the US Army Air Corps (Ferry Squadron) in 1941 and flew Bomber Transports as as a Flight Engineer until 1945.

In 2015, when Cornell turned 95, Neil arranged for a birthday flight for Cornell and made this fantastic three-minute video of the occasion.

When I wrote about the B-52 a few weeks ago, Andy mailed me a fantastic photograph of him in a B-52 stationed at Upper Heyford in 1981.

It truly is a HUGE aircraft. The fuselage is so big that it is actually rippled/undulating.

The guy showing me around said that if the tail gunner couldn’t be bothered to use the correct crawl space to get to the cockpit to grab some food (there was a grill between the pilot/co-pilot seats), well then, the pilot would radio back and confirm that the bomb doors were closed and locked so he could just RUN across the bomb bay.

I remember after Thatcher getting in, in 1979…the sheer amount of US military aircraft that were being dumped into the UK. As an 11-year-old, it was quite an awesome sight to watch these things going overhead. Even a Starfighter made an appearance! Lord knows why or just how exactly it got there, not noted for their range!)

Finally, on my personal newsletter, Accidents and Incidents, I wrote about my odd experience taking part in a documentary about the Bermuda Triangle. They invited me to talk about Flight 19 but somehow I ended up in the left seat of an Airbus A320 simulator!

They Let Me Fly the Plane tells the whole story.

It’s happened so fast, I don’t know what to say, so I comply, pushing the thrust levers forward and veering back and forth on the runway while the director fires questions at me. We lift off but I have no idea how much pressure to use on the side-stick; I am pitching the airliner up and down like a dolphin as I try to answer his questions. The camera man looks slightly green but valiantly keeps filming, asking me to look towards him because my hair is covering my face. The supervisor points out that I still need to retract the gears; we are flying with our wheels down and flaps still set for take off.

“Look at me,” says the director. “Talk about how easy it is to fly.”

(Warning: contains strong language)

I didn’t write about the documentary here at the time (I wanted to see how the documentary turned out! It wasn’t bad actually) but I did write Airbus A320 vs Grumman Avenger.

I’ve been travelling so much, I haven’t had the time to write something new. What I did write, for reasons that are difficult to explain, was a comparison of the Grumman TBF Avenger and the Airbus A320.

As usual, the best bit is in the comments.

There’s been a lot of interesting crashes to discuss and especially, a lot of media interest, which gives the perception that air travel has been unusually dangerous in 2025. As of right now, the US fatal accident count is trending only slightly higher than 2024. Globally, there does not (so far!) to be a spike in the number of serious accidents. We’ll get back at looking at these next week.