Latest Posts – Page 126
Don’t Land With Your Gear Up
If you’ve flown a retractable, you’ve had it drummed into you: put the undercarriage down, check you put the undercarriage down and then check it once on short final. I came close, once. I was doing a circuit to land at North Weald. I wanted to get around quickly and took a decision not to…
Read more… 9 Mar 12
Lanzarote Overrun: I have nothing planned
It was an uneventful night. The crew went on duty on Thursday night at 20:40 for scheduled passenger flights on a Boeing 737-800 from Lanzarote to Glasgow and back. Friday morning, on the return leg, their work is almost done. The First Officer is flying and the Captain has taken the opportunity to have a…
Read more… 2 Mar 12
I’m on Television on Monday!
Last autumn, I received an interesting email from a woman researching an aircraft accident. She’d read my post on Northwest Flight 188 (the pilots who flew straight past their destination) and wanted to ask my opinion about the incident and how it compared to the Air India Express last year. I started to mail back…
Read more… 24 Feb 12
Soothing Aviation Videos for Troubled Souls
I’ve got some sort of horrible chest cold and to be honest, I’m not sure I’m capable of stringing two words together. All I want to do is sleep. So I’m taking the day off and watching soothing videos. No crashes, no discussion, no analyses. Just aircraft in flight, looking beautiful. These are my favourites…
Read more… 17 Feb 12
Cockpit View of a Fatal Crash
The plane went missing on the 10th of August in 1984. It was a Cessna L-19E “Bird Dog” – a two-seater liaison and observation aircraft built for the US Military. L-19 Crash Documents [The pilot] had been offered a contract by the Colorado Dept. of Forestry to videotape a particularly nasty type of beetle infestation…
Read more… 10 Feb 12
The Wings Fell Off
(Before I start, I want to share some exciting news. You Fly Like a Woman appeared in Forbes this week! And it was reviewed – in Dutch and English! – on Aviationbookreviews. I would never have written the book without the support of the blog readers, so here’s a big THANK YOU to all of…
Read more… 3 Feb 12
Accident Analysis
Social Media Influencers Weigh Down Aircraft
The fatal crash at Scottsdale Arizona took place directly after take-off. The passengers were a self-proclaimed crowd of social media influencers. The jet-setting influencer who had organised the flight, had…
Fatal SR22 Stall on Final at Barwick LaFayette
On the 20th of March, 2025, a Cirrus SR22 crashed in LaFayette, Georgia during an instructional flight, killing both the pilot and the flight instructor. It was a good flying…
Demystifying
Someone has to write the TAF
It turns out that there a person sitting there deciding what the weather is going to do. Which seems obvious, except that I had somehow never asked msyelf who “someone”…
The Pilots, the Probes, and the AF447 Verdict
On the 21st of May 2026, the Paris Court of Appeal convicted Airbus and Air France of involuntary manslaughter for their roles in the crash of Air France flight 447,…
History
The CIA's Shark Screen
Today we have a guest post from the CIA! In their archives, researching something completely different, I found the answer to a question I never thought to ask. I immediately…
The First Jet to Land on an Aircraft Carrier (Deliberately)
“The Vampire was the first jet to land on a moving aircraft carrier deliberately.” This quote from Airshow Luke, our MC at the Legacy of Liberty airshow, made me almost…
Fun Stuff
Petrified, Petrified, Petrified
There’s been some interesting reporting in the UK media about a “near disaster” over Canary Wharf involving the captain having to intervene (the horror!) after air data systems failed on…
Aviation Stories You Might Have Missed
I hope you all are having a wonderful holiday season. This week, I’ve put together a compilation of interesting items in the press that you might have missed while enjoying…
