Fighter Jet Takeoff and Landing: The Real Numbers, F-104 to F-35
Share this story 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...
How Much Runway Does a 747 Need? 737, 777 and A380 Compared
Share this story 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...
FAR 91.117: Why Airliners Slow to 250 Knots Below 10,000 Feet
Share this story 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...
Breguet 941: The STOL Airliner Eastern Actually Flew
Share this story 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...
SWISS A350: The Third Jet Lands, Seven Still to Come
Share this story 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...
Fokker F28: Canada Scrapped 12, Three Escaped the Shredder
Share this story Fifteen jet airliners sat on the apron at Saskatoon for close to two decades, going quietly to pieces in Saskatchewan winters. They were Fokker F28 Fellowships, and they had once belonged to Canadian Regional Airlines. As of this week they are gone....
Seat 11A, Jeans and Brace Position: Three Cabin Safety Myths
Share this story On 12 June 2025, an Air India Boeing 787-8 came down within a minute of leaving Ahmedabad. Of the 242 people on board, one walked away: Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, who had been sitting in seat 11A. People on the ground were...
Mayday, Pan-Pan and Squawk 7700: What Pilots Say on the Radio
Share this story A controller is working a busy approach frequency. Four aircraft are talking over one another about runway changes and speed restrictions. Then one voice comes through, flat and unhurried, and says a single word three times. Everyone else stops...
Sabena 548: The Crash That Erased a National Team
Share this story On the morning of 15 February 1961 a Sabena Boeing 707 came out of a clear sky over Belgium, circled Brussels airport three times while its crew fought it, and fell into a field at Berg, less than two miles short of the runway. Seventy-two people on...
Flying Tiger 739: 107 People Vanished Over the Pacific
Share this story Ninety-three young American soldiers, three South Vietnamese servicemen and eleven civilian crew boarded a Super Constellation at Travis Air Force Base in March 1962 and flew west. Somewhere between Guam and the Philippines, the aeroplane stopped...
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