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), there was one question in the pre-interview that I wanted to share more widely. We were talking about the fact that radio stations triangulated their…
Read more… 7 Feb 20
Last week (the 26th of January 2020), a Sikorsky S-76B helicopter built in 1991 crashed in Calabasas, California, killing the pilot and all eight passengers. This has made mainstream press because Kobe Bryant, a famous basketball player, was on board and because it is not immediately clear why the helicopter crashed at all. It’s always…
Read more… 31 Jan 20
These photographs are from last March but they’ve just been featured in Nature magazine’s collection of the best science images of the year NASA has been exploring the potential of photographic technology resulting in these beautiful air-to-air photographs of supersonic aircraft and how their shockwaves interact. Two T-38 Talon twinjet supersonic jet trainers were flown…
Read more… 24 Jan 20
On Wednesday the 8th of January 2020, Ukraine International Airlines flight 752, a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Kiev, suffered a catastrophic failure directly after take-off. The aircraft was a Boeing 737-800 registration UR-PSR with 167 passengers and nine crew members on board. The aircraft departed Imam Khomeini International Airport on runway 29R at…
Read more… 17 Jan 20
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
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
On the 19th of February 2023, a private pilot arranged to meet with a flight instructor at Birr Airfield to fly a Cessna 172 Skyhawk. That morning, the flight instructor…
On the 9th of August 2024 at 16:22, Voepass flight 2283, a scheduled flight from Cascavel, Paraná, to Guarulhos, São Paulo entered a flat spin and crashed into a residential…
There are a number of reasons why you might need to quickly point out the differences between a General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon and a Eurofighter EF2000 Typhoon. You might…
A few days ago (21st of May 2024), Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 encountered heavy turbulence on a passenger flight from London-Heathrow to Singapore. There were 229 on board, including eighteen…
This video of a mid-air wheel exchange goes viral once a year or so, but I never get tired of watching it. Last week, it showed up on Reddit and…
This week, we have a guest post by J.B. Rivard who wrote an article for the American Aviation Historical Society (AAHS) and used one of my articles as a reference.…
Mistakes were made. All of them were mine. Before I left for Dresden, I planned out my full itinerary. Berlin is a much busier airport than Tallinn, so I needed…
I’m in Dresden at the moment and I’m afraid I haven’t had a free moment to write you a new article. Luckily, lots of other people are on the internet…