Latest Posts – Page 5
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 lose sight of the jet. Not because I doubted the claim. The DH-100 Vampire was one of the first single-engine jets and so it made…
Read more… 15 May 26
Fuel Switches in the Cutoff Position on China Eastern flight 5735
On the 21st of March 2022, a Boeing 737 passenger airliner crashed into a mountain. This was China Eastern Airlines flight 5735 flying from Kunming to Guangzhou in the People’s Republic of China. All 132 souls on board perished in the crash. This was the first fatal crash of a Chinese mainline carrier in nearly twelve years.…
Read more… 8 May 26
Outtakes from the Air Show
I’m still on the road and using the quiet hours to work through my photographs from the air show. Aviation photography sure does have a way of revealing one’s limitations! The aircraft fly faster than I expect. The framing is just a few feet off. Someone stands up in excitement and photobombs the shot. Another…
Read more… 1 May 26
Ferry Tank Failure: Successful SR22 Ditching in the Pacific
In 2015, I shared a video of an SR22 whose pilot successfully deployed his Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) off of the coast of Maui, Hawai’i. I wrote at the time that I would update once the final report came out. I am rather behind on my todo list, I’m afraid. The Cirrus SR22 is at…
Read more… 24 Apr 26
Meowing on Guard (an attempt at an explanation)
Last week a video went viral and it’s been fun to see the mainstream media coverage try to cover two pilots who were heard making animal noises on the radio. There’s a lot of contextual knowledge and lore to understand what happened here, so although the actual event really isn’t worth a news headline, it is…
Read more… 18 Apr 26
I wanted to post this from 30,000 feet
I’m in transit this week, somewhere between time zones, airport coffee, and the unsettling suspicion that I’ve forgotten something important. The article about a double-engine failure that I planned to finish in advance kept getting more complicated. At the point where I thought “maybe this is a three-part article”, I realised that I wasn’t going…
Read more… 10 Apr 26
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…
Four Point Two Stars Where You Only Stop If You Have To
I always look up airports when I’m writing about them, partly out of habit and partly because I’m afraid I’ll miss an important detail. When I was writing Any Landing…
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…
