Share this story Every pilot learns the phrase in their first few hours of ground school: eight hours bottle to throttle. It sounds simple. It is also only the beginning of the rules, and plenty of pilots who think they know them have been caught out, sometimes in...
Share this story Watch an F-15 Eagle come in to land and you will see a large panel rise up on its back, just behind the cockpit, like a door opening into the airflow. It is the speed brake, and on the Eagle it is big enough to earn the nickname barn door. It exists...
Share this story At 8:40 on the morning of 15 June 1919, a big biplane came out of the low cloud over County Galway. The pilot saw a flat green field near the Marconi wireless station at Clifden and put the aircraft down. The field was a bog. The wheels sank, the nose...
Share this story Thunderstorms had kept the Hindenburg circling for hours. When the giant airship finally turned in towards the mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, on the evening of 6 May 1937, reporters, photographers and newsreel crews were...
Share this story For decades pilots have passed a quiet piece of advice down the line: if you are struggling, do not tell the doctor. Admitting depression or anxiety could mean months on the ground, a special-issuance process that can drag past a year, and for some,...
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,...
Share this story A go-around is the one manoeuvre every airline pilot rehearses until it is boring, because when it happens for real it is anything but. Full thrust, nose up, gear and flaps coming in, a new clearance on the radio. It is precisely the moment Boeing has...
Share this story Watch a B-52 land in a strong crosswind and it looks like something has gone badly wrong. The bomber comes down the approach pointing well off to one side of the runway, touches down still pointing that way, and rolls out with its nose aimed at the...
Share this story A reel doing the rounds on Instagram poses a question that comes up in every aviation comment section sooner or later: why do Russian jets burn blue, not orange like American ones? The claim we are checking. An American jet burning blue: an F/A-18F...
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...
Share this story Fifty-two minutes after leaving New York, the pilots of Swissair Flight 111 noticed an unusual smell in the cockpit. It was the evening of 2 September 1998, the MD-11 was cruising at 33,000 feet over the Atlantic south of Nova Scotia, and nothing else...
Share this story “Flying under the radar” is one of the few pieces of aviation slang that means exactly what it says. It is not a metaphor about avoiding attention. It is a statement about geometry, and the geometry is unforgiving in both directions. Ask...
Recent Comments