FAR 91.211: How Long Can You Fly Without Oxygen?
Ask how long a pilot can fly without oxygen and you get two answers that do not resemble each other. The legal answer lives in 14 CFR 91.211, and at 12,000 feet it is remarkably relaxed: fly all day. The physiological answer comes from the FAA’s own aeromedical...
Fiat G.55 Centauro: Italy’s Best Fighter, Built Too Late
In February 1943 a German evaluation commission arrived at the Italian flight test centre at Guidonia with an Fw 190A-5 and a Bf 109G-4, and spent several weeks flying them against three new Italian fighters. The head of the commission, Oberst Petersen, telegraphed...
Su-30MKI: Why the Indian Air Force Flies With Two Crew
Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales. China’s J-20 is...
Tarom’s First 737 MAX Arrives as Its Rescue Plan Slips
At 18:51 on the evening of 8 September, a Boeing 737-8 registered YR-BGO touched down at Henri Coandă in Bucharest, having flown in directly from the United States. It is the first 737 MAX Tarom has ever operated, and the first in Romania. Boeing, Tarom and the lessor...
Switzerland Is Scrapping ILS as GPS Spoofing Hits Crews Daily
Swiss crews meet GPS spoofing every day. Switzerland is nonetheless switching its airports away from the ground-based landing system that spoofing cannot touch, and doing it to save money. That plan has just started to unravel. The Tages-Anzeiger reported today that...
Fighter Jet Takeoff and Landing: The Real Numbers, F-104 to F-35
A Lockheed F-104 Starfighter came down final approach at 175 knots with full flaps, and that was the basic number. The pilot then added five knots for every 1,000 pounds of fuel still in the tanks above the first thousand. On a typical recovery that put the approach...
How Much Runway Does a 747 Need? 737, 777 and A380 Compared
Type the question into a search engine and you get a number. A 747 needs 10,000 feet. Or 3,000 metres. Or 8,000 feet. The numbers disagree with each other, none of them cite anything, and all of them are answering a question that does not really exist. There is no...
FAR 91.117: Why Airliners Slow to 250 Knots Below 10,000 Feet
Sit at the front of a descending airliner and you can feel the moment. The nose comes up a fraction, the engines spool, and a low rumble rises through the floor as the speedbrakes bite. The aeroplane has just arrived at 10,000 feet with too much energy, and it is now...
Breguet 941: The STOL Airliner Eastern Actually Flew
In 1968, for two months, Eastern Air Lines flew fare-paying passengers between cities in the north-eastern United States in a French military transport with four propellers all driven by the same shaft. The following year American Airlines tried the same aircraft, and...
SWISS A350: The Third Jet Lands, Seven Still to Come
Swiss has a third Airbus A350. According to aeroTELEGRAPH, HB-IFC arrived in Zurich on 12 September, joining the two A350-900s already in the fleet and continuing the slowest, most consequential fleet change the airline has made in twenty years. Three aircraft out of...
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