FAA Age Limits: Why Pilots Retire at 65 and Controllers Start by 31
Share this story Two of the most demanding jobs in aviation have hard age limits written into American law. One of them ends a career. The other one prevents a career from ever starting. An airline captain who is flying a perfect line check on the morning of their...
How Fighter Pilots Pee: Piddle Packs, AIRUS and Tactical Dehydration
Share this story It is the question every fighter pilot gets asked at a dinner party, and the one the US Air Force spent five years and a public innovation competition trying to answer properly. How do you go to the toilet when you are strapped into an ejection seat,...
Findel Shut by Drones Again: Luxembourg’s Second Closure in Days
Share this story Luxembourg’s Findel Airport has now been closed by drones twice inside a week, and nobody knows who is flying them. The first closure, on Friday evening 18 September, diverted nineteen inbound flights and stranded more than 1,800 passengers. The...
Airbus Broughton: The A380 Wing Hall Becomes an A321 Factory
Share this story Broughton’s West Factory was built in 2003 to make the biggest wings anyone had ever attempted: 83,500 square metres of floor under one roof, put there so that North Wales could build the wings of the Airbus A380. When the superjumbo programme...
Yosemite Helicopter Crash: Two Killed on the Dome Fire
Share this story The Dome Fire had been burning in Yosemite National Park for five days. On Sunday afternoon a Eurocopter AS332L1 Super Puma was working it the way heavy helicopters do: dipping a bucket, climbing out, running in low over the trees, releasing, turning...
Iranian Airlines Grounded Worldwide From Wednesday, US Says
Share this story Sanctions usually work slowly. You cannot buy this aircraft, you cannot get that part, and a fleet quietly ages into uselessness over twenty years. What the US Treasury Secretary described on Monday is something faster and blunter. “On September...
NATS Prestwick Outage: Scotland’s Airspace Throttled Again
Share this story Thirteen days. That is how long British aviation got between one national air traffic control failure and the next. Early on Monday morning a connectivity fault hit the NATS centre at Prestwick, the facility that runs Scottish upper airspace and feeds...
OBOGS Explained: Why Fighter Pilots No Longer Breathe Pure Oxygen
Share this story Ask most people what a fighter pilot breathes and the answer comes back instantly: pure oxygen. It is one of those facts everyone knows, it was broadly true for about forty years, and today it is wrong in two separate directions. Modern fighters...
Newark Ground Stop: One Cut Cable, Eight Hours, Five Airports
Share this story At about ten o’clock on Monday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped Newark Liberty, Teterboro and Philadelphia International. At one in the afternoon it added John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia. Between roughly 09:40 and just after...
Polar Routes: Why Airliners Cross the Arctic but Not Antarctica
Share this story There is a Boeing 757 parked on the Antarctic ice at 79 degrees south. It is white, it has rows of passenger windows, and it got there under its own power on a runway of polished blue ice at Union Glacier, roughly 1,000 kilometres from the South Pole....
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