I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and aviation history, when Ivan Smirnov crashlanded on the coast of northwest Australia, losing a cigar box of diamonds in the process. The recording was done…
Read more… 22 Jan 21
On the 9th of January 2021, Sriwijaya Air flight 182, a domestic scheduled passenger flight from Jakarta to Pontianak, crashed four minutes after departure. Sriwijaya Air is an Indonesian low-cost airline based at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Jakarta. Founded in 2003, the airline initially offered flights between Jakarta and Pangkal Pingang before introducing new routes…
Read more… 15 Jan 21
On the Friday the 13th of November 2020, an Antonov An-124-100 had a very unlucky day. The Antonov An-124 is a Soviet designed and Ukrainian manufactured four-engined aircraft. It’s a massive beast with a maximum take-off weight of 405,000 kilos. The An-124 was the heaviest cargo aircraft of its time and is still the largest…
Read more… 8 Jan 21
Every year I take a look at the most popular posts of the year, by which I mean the posts most read in that year, regardless of when they were posted. Intriguingly, this year it was a number of older posts that attracted the most attention, possibly a result of the world having much more…
Read more… 1 Jan 21
It’s Christmas day and I’m taking the day off! Wishing everyone one of you all the best at the end of 2020 (thank goodness!) and hoping for a much improved 2021! Here are some pieces I found online, just because I can’t bear to leave you without something to read: A B-17 deployed to drop…
Read more… 25 Dec 20
On the 8th of May 2017, an ICON A5 aircraft crashed into Lake Berryessa, California, after attempting to turn away from rising terrain. The pilot was an engineer and test pilot for ICON aircraft and very experienced. He and his passenger were killed on impact. It’s a relatively familiar mountain-flying story, an aircraft boxed in…
Read more… 18 Dec 20
Air Midwest, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, was originally certified as an air carrier by the FAA in 1965. The airline originally consisted of a single Cessna 206, which transported human…
We have explored the aircraft registered as PK-LQP in quite some detail, looking at the sequence of events leading up to the crash of Lion Air flight 610. The Maintenance…
When I was learning to fly, I remember someone in the pilots’ bar insisting that all that talk about life jackets under your seat was a waste of time; if…
This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…
The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…
A few months ago, I wrote about how to shoot down a fighter jet while flying it, the case of a test-pilot in a Grumman F-11 Tiger who managed to…
When the Kantonspolizei Zürich (the police department of the Swiss canton of Zurich) posted a photograph on Facebook showing the contents of a standard patrol car, they had no idea…
Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial…