Kurt Wintgens: The First Kill With a Synchronised Machine Gun
Share this story On 1 July 1915, near Lunéville in eastern France, a young German lieutenant in a small monoplane closed on a French Morane-Saulnier parasol and did something no fighter pilot had yet done successfully in combat. He aimed his whole aircraft at...
Akutan Zero: The Crash That Revealed the Zero’s Weaknesses
Share this story From the air, the patch of green on Akutan Island looked perfect: flat, grassy, a gift for a pilot with a dying engine. Petty Officer Tadayoshi Koga lowered his wheels and set up to land. The grass was hiding water. The moment his main gear touched,...
Nor’easter Hits Boston Logan: Cape Air Grounded, Hundreds of Flights Cancelled
Share this story Boston Logan does not usually lose hundreds of flights to a September weekend. This one it did. A powerful nor'easter parked off the New England coast from Friday 25 September, bringing heavy rain, coastal flooding and, crucially for aviation,...
KLM 867: The 747 That Lost All Four Engines Over Alaska
Share this story On 15 December 1989, a brand-new KLM Boeing 747-400 was descending towards Anchorage, Alaska, on its way from Amsterdam to Tokyo. The day before, Mount Redoubt, about 150 miles away, had erupted. Somewhere in the grey winter sky over the Alaskan...
Carrier-Capable Aircraft: Why the F-22 Can’t, and a C-130 Did
Share this story On 30 October 1963 the crew of USS Forrestal watched a four-engined transport with a 132-foot wingspan come down their deck. It had no tailhook. It had no catapult attachment. The ship’s island cleared its wingtip by about fifteen feet. It...
Qatar Airways Retires Its A330s and Sends Pilots to RwandAir
Share this story Qatar Airways has quietly ended an era. The Doha carrier has retired its Airbus A330 passenger fleet, Reuters reported on 25 September, and it is sending some of the pilots who flew them to Rwanda. The move is a direct consequence of the Iran war. Jet...
GPS Jamming Over Los Angeles: United Crews Report Interference
Share this story GPS jamming is usually a story from the Baltic, the Black Sea or the Middle East. In the early hours of Friday 25 September, it was a story from Los Angeles. Crews on at least two United Airlines flights told air traffic controllers that GPS...
FAA Ends Single-Pilot Flying in Older Cessna Citation Jets
Share this story For more than forty years, a Cessna Citation that legally needed two pilots could be flown by one, as long as the pilot held the right exemption and endorsement. That ends on 29 September. The FAA has announced that it will stop issuing single-pilot...
Airline Pilot and Controller Pay: What They Actually Earn
Share this story Type “do air traffic controllers make 300k” into Google and you will get a wall of confident yes. It is one of those numbers that circulates because it sounds plausible and nobody checks the source. The source, as it turns out, says...
Why Airliners Still Can’t Go Supersonic Over Land
Share this story An airliner crossing Kansas at Mach 0.85 is doing nothing remarkable. The same aeroplane at Mach 1.01 would be breaking federal law. The line is not about safety, or engineering, or fuel. It is about a noise, and about an American town in 1964 that...
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