Latest Posts   –  Page 5

A Very Merry Christmas

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

ICON A5 mountain crash

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

A Plague of Locusts

On the 9th of January 2020, Ethiopian Airlines flight 363 was on approach to Dire Dawa Airport. The aircraft was a Boeing B737-700 (registration ET-ALN) on a 30-minute domestic passenger flight from Djibouti to Dire Dawa in Ethiopia. It should have been routine; however January 2020 was the start of what has turned out to…

Read more… 11 Dec 20

Explosive Decompression on the Ground

The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers. It was snowing and the temperature was around -5°C (23°F). Normally the aircraft was kept in a hangar if available, however, this wasn’t possible at…

Read more… 4 Dec 20

Small Plane Gets Stoned

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 smashed with a large rock? I have to admit, I presumed some sort of airfield accident when the plane was parked but, until I saw…

Read more… 27 Nov 20

Instructor Unconscious During Student Flight

This is a happy-ending story of an Australian student suddenly finding himself in command of the training aircraft. He had less than three hours flying experience and this was his first time in a Cessna 152, a single-engine light aircraft popular with flight schools for training. That day, his instructor took him flying in the…

Read more… 20 Nov 20

Accident Reports

Fatal Seaplane Crash at Oshkosh

The flight crew is often the last safety net when things go wrong, making their failures an easy target for us to point at. After all, if the pilot can…

Never Just One Thing: Air Midwest flight 5481 part 2

Last week, we looked at the weight and balance of Air Midwest 5481, which had been underestimated for a number of different reasons. However, although the aircraft was overweight and…

Demystifying

Maintaining the Stores

We don’t often talk about parked aircraft because it is not very common for them to be involved in crashes. However, one of the side-effects of these pandemic times is…

How Many Successful Ditchings of Commercial Airliners?

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…

History

The Last Known Whereabouts of the White Bird

The disappearance of L’Oiseau Blanc in 1927 is one of the enduring mysteries of aviation history. The pilots eventually achieved their goal of changing aviation history, but certainly not in…

The History Listen

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…

Fun Stuff

The Tetris Challenge

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…

The History Listen

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…