Latest Posts – Page 45
Lion Air flight 610: In the Cockpit
On the 29th of October 2018, Lion Air flight 610, a Boeing 737-8 (MAX) crashed at Tanjung Karawang, West Java after departing from Jakarta. This crash was the first public sign that there was something wrong with the Boeing 737-MAX; the initial domino in a cascading sequence of events that uncovered an unbelievable quagmire of…
Read more… 24 Sep 21
Maintaining Focus in the Cockpit
This article by Key Dismukes, Grant Young and Robert Sumwait is based on their research at NASA to study the problem of crew preoccupation. They reviewed NTSB reports of accidents attributed to crew error and concluded that nearly half of them involved lapses of attention associated with interruptions, distractions, or preoccupation with one task to…
Read more… 17 Sep 21
Crash at Pensacola: “I wasn’t ridiculously low”
On Tuesday the 13th of August 2019, a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, registration N84287 crashed into a sand bar on the Escambia River near Jay, Florida, near the Alabama border. The pilot held both commercial pilot and flight instructor certificates with over 1,000 hours flight time, 798 hours in the aircraft make and model. The aircraft…
Read more… 10 Sep 21
VSS Unity: Trajectory Deviation at Mach 3
On the 11th of July 2021, Virgin Galactic’s space vessel, VSS Unity, was launched from the Spaceport American facility near Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, which I have to admit sounds more like a Hunter S. Thompson novel than a real place. There were two pilots and four passengers on board, including company founder,…
Read more… 3 Sep 21
A Little Bit of Everything
There’s so much great aviation writing and video out there and I’m always appreciative when people send me fun things; it seems a shame not to share them! So here’s a collection of pieces that caught my eye this month. My Favorite Aunt Nancy (FAN) sent me this one about the tragic end of the…
Read more… 27 Aug 21
The Mount Erebus Disaster
On the 28th of November 1979, a sight-seeing flight to Antartica crashed into Mount Erebus, killing all 257 on board. The Mount Erebus Disaster, as it came to be known, is famous not just for the tragic accident, New Zealand’s worst peacetime disaster, but also because the final accident report’s conclusion was overturned within a…
Read more… 20 Aug 21
Accident Analysis
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.…
KLM 1673 Veers Off the Runway with Full Right Rudder
On the 28th of November 2004, a Boeing B737 ran off the runway at Barcelona Airport. The weather had been good at Barcelona that evening. The flight crew agreed to land…
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
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…
