Wizz Air Strips Engines From Its Parked A321XLRs
Share this story There is a particular kind of corporate embarrassment that can only be photographed from an airport perimeter fence. At Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, a handful of nearly new Airbus A321XLRs are parked up with holes where their engines used to be. The...
Malpensa Power Bank Fire: easyJet A320 Evacuated by Slides
Share this story The safety demonstration had barely finished when the exits it describes were needed in earnest. At 17:24 on Thursday afternoon, easyJet flight U23905 pushed back from Terminal 2 at Milan Malpensa, bound for Prague with 146 passengers aboard. Seven...
Emirates Gets Berlin: Lufthansa Calls It an Own Goal
Share this story The document that finally broke a thirty-year deadlock does not mention Emirates. It does not mention Berlin either. It speaks, in the flat register of diplomacy, of an additional fifth point in the route schedule for a national carrier of the United...
Boeing 747 G-ONEE: An Open Door in the Rain Cost All Airspeed
Share this story Nothing about the night looked like the start of an emergency. On the ramp at London Heathrow, a One Air Boeing 747 freighter sat with its left forward passenger door — the L1 door — standing open, because the engineers changing its smoke...
NTSB: 21 Air 767 Touched Down on Miami Runway 30 at 158 Knots
Share this story On 9 September the National Transportation Safety Board published the first hard numbers from the Miami accident. They are not a verdict. They are a list of times, speeds and annunciations read off two recorders in a laboratory in Washington, and the...
Europe’s Most Extreme Airports: Highest, Steepest, Shortest
Share this story The timetable at Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is not fixed. It cannot be. The runway is a beach, and twice a day the Atlantic covers it. The United Kingdom’s aeronautical information publication states the position without drama:...
The 70/50 Takeoff Rule: What the FAA Says and Where It Fails
Share this story Halfway down the runway, the decision is already made. Either the aeroplane is accelerating the way the handbook said it would, or it is not, and in the second case the only variable left is how much runway remains to stop in. The 70/50 rule exists to...
Shortest Takeoff Distance: From Valdez STOL Records to Airliners
Share this story Pioneer Field sits at sea level on the edge of Prince William Sound, and every May a steady breeze rolls in off the water. On 12 May 2018 that breeze was blowing 12 to 15 knots straight down the runway when Frank Knapp lined up a yellow, slat-winged...
Fin Markings Decoded: What Air Force Tail Codes Mean
Share this story Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person...
Operation Yellow Ribbon: The Day Gander Took 6,600 Strangers
Share this story Gander sits in the middle of Newfoundland, in spruce and bog, a long way from anywhere. In 2001 fewer than ten thousand people lived there. Its airport had four runways built for a different era, when piston airliners needed to stop for fuel before...
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