Latest Posts   –  Page 3

Bek Air flight 2100 Crash After Take Off

On the 27th of December 2019, Bek Air flight 2100, a domestic passenger flight with 93 passengers and 5 crew on board, crashed after departure from Kazakhstan’s Almaty International airport. The aircraft, a 25-year-old Fokker 100, broke into pieces after crashing into a building, leading to 12 fatalities, including the captain, and 65 people with…

Read more… 10 Jan 20

Lionair flight 610 : The Maintenance

One of the aspects of Lion Air flight 610 has been the quality of the maintenance. It is clear, now, that intermittent problems related to the air data system had been logged and clearly had not been resolved in a satisfactory manner. I have been wanting to do a deeper analysis of the various aspects…

Read more… 3 Jan 20

Top Ten Posts of 2019

Next week we’ll be starting on a detailed look at Lion Air flight 610 but first, to celebrate the end of 2019, I want to share the most popular posts of the year. Most of these are older posts and in fact only one of them was written this year, which makes me worry that…

Read more… 27 Dec 19

Seasonal Greetings from Fear of Landing

I’m pretty sure it’s a tradition now that I get the Friday before Christmas off. At least, I hope so, because I’ve got some kind of horrible sniffly-sneezy-coughing-possibly-dying thing and I just do not have enough brain to finish the piece I have been working on. So I’m going back to bed and feeling sorry…

Read more… 20 Dec 19

360° at 100 feet

Last week, “Captn Al” called out poor decision making in a video of an 727 doing a low-level 360° when he found the runway occupied by a light aircraft. In a week where there have been videos of poor decision making below MSA, sadly here’s another one. Accidents just don’t happen, they are caused! #flying…

Read more… 13 Dec 19

Airbus A320 vs Grumman Avenger

I was offered the opportunity of a free week in Berlin, which is fabulous but 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. These two planes…

Read more… 6 Dec 19

Accident Reports

Part 2: The Analysis of Southern Airways flight 932

This is a continuation from my post last week on the crash of Southern Airways flight 932. In that post, I stepped through the sequence of events which led to…

The Crash of Southern Airways flight 932

On the 14th of November in 1970, a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 crashed on final approach to the Huntington Tri-State airport in West Virginia, killing all 75 on board. The aircraft…

Demystifying

"N28V, I need your call sign, please."

This general aviation accident didn’t happen on the 27th of April 2017, although I think you’ll agree with me that it was a near thing. The aircraft, a 1964 Mooney…

Aviation Airspeed Guide

Just a quick one today but I really liked this guide to the airspeed indicator which was published to r/aviation. The thread has ended up in an interesting discussion about…

History

Flight 19: The Point of No Return

I was interviewed about Flight 19 for a documentary recently and although I’ve limited the details of the experience to supporters of my personal Patreon (for travel writing and essays),…

Wingless Flight in the M2-F1

Sometimes, the most interesting aircraft are the experimental ones that barely made it off the ground. Sometimes the most intriguing stories come out of things I don’t understand. ​ I…

Fun Stuff

Toddler Overboard and other aviation videos

I’ve got quite a collection of interesting videos building up so it’s past time for me to share them! These are not all brand new but new to me and…

Ghost Planes and Spooky Things

I noticed yesterday that the nights were getting longer and there’s a distinct chill to the air. Rudy then mentioned Samhain, the Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest…