Quebec Helicopter Crash: Four Killed Near Montreal
Share this story It was meant to be a birthday treat: a short helicopter ride over the farmland of Quebec’s Montérégie region on a Saturday afternoon. Shortly after take-off on 26 September, the helicopter came down in a field in...
FedEx Panda Express: A 777F Flies Two Giant Pandas to Atlanta
Share this story The cargo manifest was short. Two giant pandas, some fresh bamboo, water, a few favourite treats and their keepers from Zoo Atlanta. That was the entire load on a FedEx Boeing 777F that took off from Chengdu in the small hours of Sunday 27 September...
IndiGo A321 Tail Strike at Bengaluru After a Go-Around
Share this story The first approach into Bengaluru did not work out, so the crew of IndiGo flight 6E 6542 went around. On the second attempt, in gusty winds on Sunday 27 September, the tail of their Airbus A321 touched the runway. The jet landed safely and everyone...
Lufthansa 747 LH470 Diverts to Manchester With a Burning Smell
Share this story Manchester does not get many jumbo jets any more. On Saturday afternoon, 26 September, it got one it had not planned for, and by Sunday there were two of them parked side by side on the ramp. Lufthansa flight LH470 from Frankfurt to Toronto was...
Delta DL251 Smoke Emergency: A330 Diverts to Porto
Share this story Two hours out of Barcelona, somewhere west of the Iberian coast, the cabin of Delta Air Lines flight DL251 began to fill with smoke. The Airbus A330-300 was bound for Boston with 296 passengers on board. Instead of pressing on across the Atlantic, the...
Into the Eye of Hurricane Polo: NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters on Video
Share this story A four-engined turboprop lurches, drops and shudders through a wall of grey. Rain hammers the windscreen, the instruments blur, and the flight engineer in the middle seat works the power levers. Then, suddenly, the cockpit fills with light: blue sky...
Monster Fans and a Flying Bathtub: Inside NASA’s Giant Wind Tunnels
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Mayday vs SOS: Why Aviation Needed a Word, Not a Rhythm
Share this story Twice an hour, for three minutes, the North Atlantic fell silent. At a quarter past and a quarter to, every wireless operator on every ship within reach of 500 kilohertz stopped transmitting, pressed his headphones a little harder against his ears,...
Eastern Shuttle Flight 1320: The 1970 Hijacking That Brought Screening to US Airports
Share this story On the evening of 17 March 1970, Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. The Shuttle worked like a bus: no reservations, no security check, and you paid your fare on board once the aircraft was in...
Remove Before Flight: What the Red Tags on Aircraft Really Do
Share this story Walk around any aircraft parked on a ramp and you will see them fluttering in the breeze: long red ribbons printed with three words in white capitals. REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. They hang from pitot tubes, landing gear, engine intakes and ejection seats,...
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