Latest Posts – Page 39
Preliminary Details of a Helicopter Crash in New Jersey
I don’t normally write an article based on a preliminary report; however, this one made me sit back in my chair. On the 4th of June 2022, a Bell 407GXP helicopter, registration N98ZA, crashed near Fairfield, New Jersey. The Bell 407 is a single-engine helicopter with a four-blade “soft-in-plane” design rotor, which means that it…
Read more… 17 Jun 22
Bird Opens Cargo Door on A320
On the 20th of June in 2011, an Airbus A320-212, registration CS-TKJ, taxied to runway 05 at Aeroporto de Madeira for a scheduled morning flight from Funchal to Copenhagen with seven crew members and 105 passengers on board. A plane spotter taking photographs of aircraft at the threshold of runway 05 took a photograph of…
Read more… 10 Jun 22
The Human-Machine Interface: Reports from ASRS
CALLBACK is a NASA publication from their Aviation Safety Reporting System which takes anonymised ASRS reports and presents them in a “lessons learned” format. Every month, they focus on a different aspect of aviation safety, One issue that they have focused on recently, which coincidentally fits in with some of the accidents that we have…
Read more… 3 Jun 22
Avro York Runway Excursion at Stansted
While researching another subject, I discovered this accident report from 1956 which I just had to share with you. Normally, an aviation accident investigation is done by a group of experts who must come together to create a report of their findings and analyses. A good report is informative and clear in its conclusions; to…
Read more… 27 May 22
I am a teapot
A reader contacted me to ask about a missing flight 404; they had heard on a trivia podcast that the original computer error message 404 was based on two flights 404 that disappeared. I tracked down the podcast episode and while talking about the number 4 and then the 404 File Not Found error, they…
Read more… 20 May 22
Passenger In Control
Everyone is talking about the passenger who safely landed a Cessna 208 Caravan at Palm Beach International Airport after the pilot slumped over the controls, incapacitated. The Cessna Caravan is a single-engine high-wing aircraft first produced in 1984. This one, registration N333LD, was recently listed as for sale on Aircraft.com, which gives us a bit…
Read more… 13 May 22
Accident Analysis
The Anatomy of an A350–CRJ Collision at Atlanta
On the 10th of September 2024, an Airbus A350 took the tail off of a Bombardier CRJ at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia, USA. Delta Air Lines flight 295…
Why KLM Cut the Steering Cables on Two Perfectly Functional Boeing 737s
Last month, we looked at the night of 28th of November 2004 at Barcelona Airport. KLM 1673 ran off the runway at high speed, stopping just short of a canal.…
Demystifying
How Important is Having a Sterile Cockpit?
This question was posted to r/flying by a private pilot who wanted to know: do airline pilots ever engage in small talk about irrelevant things during taxiing, run-up, takeoff, and…
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”…
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
Bird Strikes, Balloon Landings and Falling in Love with a Boeing 777
The exciting news on Fear of Landing this week was a huge scare about critical vulnerabilities in PHP. PHP is widely used on the web, including in WordPress, which is…
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…
