Latest Posts   –  Page 5

When Not To Go Around

We spend a lot of time talking about bad landings where the pilot(s) should have broken off the approach and gone around. It’s common to continue to try to land at all costs even when the simpler and more sensible option would be to go around and try again. I thought it was worth looking…

Read more… 11 Sep 20

Jetpacks and Wingwalking: 2020 keeps getting weirder

Twenty-twenty was always an interesting sounding year, popular with futurists and science fiction writers for having something of a ring to it, a year in which clean fuel and commercial space travel and Jetson-style jetpacks could be a reality. Well, we might have been right about one of them. Last week, Fox 11 broke the…

Read more… 4 Sep 20

Microsoft Flight Simulator: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

Microsoft Flight Simulator has released a new version, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, fourteen years after the release of Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The timing couldn’t be better, of course, with millions of people around the world unable to travel and desperate to feel that they can see the world. The original flight simulator took form…

Read more… 28 Aug 20

How to shoot down a fighter jet…while flying it.

The Grumman F-11 Tiger was a popular US Navy fighter aircraft introduced in 1956. At the time, it was known as the F11F Tiger. Grumman had been working to modernise their Cougar as a part of the Cold War arms race. US aircraft were being outperformed by the swept-wing design of the Soviet’s Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15…

Read more… 21 Aug 20

Man vs Machine: the autopilot would not switch off

Two cargo pilots on a routine cargo flight from Jersey to Guernsey, a twenty-minute flight, ended up in quite a muddle including auto-pilot issues, a go around and elevator control problems before making a safe landing back in Jersey, where they started. The incident took place on the approach to Guernsey on the 26th of…

Read more… 14 Aug 20

Wire Strike – RAF Chinook

I’ve never seen anything quite like this. According to forces.net, the Royal Air Force Chinook based at RAF Odiham (Hampshire) was taking part in a low level training sortie on its way to Devon when it struck powerlines, causing a power cut in the local area. The Chinook landed safely in a field in Wales,…

Read more… 7 Aug 20

Accident Reports

A Lesson On Keeping The Aircraft in Trim

On the 28th of May 2019, a customer arrived at a flight school at Archerfield Airport, Queensland for their first flight experience. The aircraft that day was a Cessna 152,…

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.…

Demystifying

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…

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…

History

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…

The Last Flight of B121-120

The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…

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…