Operation Yellow Ribbon: The Day Gander Took 6,600 Strangers
Share this story Gander sits in the middle of Newfoundland, in spruce and bog, a long way from anywhere. In 2001 fewer than ten thousand people lived there. Its airport had four runways built for a different era, when piston airliners needed to stop for fuel before...
Varna: A Bus Hit a TUI fly Belgium 737 MAX Wing
Share this story Nearly everyone was aboard. A hundred and eighty-eight people were flying home to Brussels from the Bulgarian coast, boarding was almost finished, and the last busload of passengers was being driven out to the aircraft. The bus touched the wing. Not...
Air Force One: A Slide Inflated Before Trump Could Board
Share this story Every airline maintenance manager on earth felt a small twinge of recognition on Tuesday afternoon. An emergency escape slide inflated on the ground, with nobody evacuating, because somebody moved a door handle in the wrong sequence. It is one of the...
NATS Outage: 2,000 UK Flights Cancelled, and a One-Week Deadline
Share this story Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled...
United Airlines Cancels Its Denver 9/11 Flyover
Share this story The plan was to take off at 8:15 in the morning, roughly the minute United 175 left Boston Logan, and to be over United’s Flight Training Center at 9:03, the exact minute that aircraft struck the South Tower. A Boeing 777 in United colours,...
Marga von Etzdorf: The First Woman to Fly for an Airline
Share this story On 19 February 1928, a 20-year-old German woman climbed into the cockpit of a Junkers F.13 named Kiek in die Welt — Berlin dialect for “look in the world” — and flew it for Lufthansa. She is generally credited as the first...
Bill Lancaster: Acquitted of Murder, Dead in the Sahara
Share this story On the morning of 20 April 1933, in the Tanezrouft, Bill Lancaster took out a fuel card and wrote what he knew would be his last message. He had been down in the Sahara for eight days. He had no water left. Exactly one year earlier, to the day, a man...
Star Alliance Builds Only Its Seventh Own Lounge, at Incheon
Share this story Star Alliance has 25-odd member airlines and access to more than a thousand airport lounges around the world. It owns six of them. Six, in twenty-nine years: Los Angeles, Amsterdam Schiphol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Buenos Aires Ezeiza, Rio de Janeiro...
Riyadh Air Opens Manila: A Labour Corridor With an Airline
Share this story At 15:55 this afternoon, a Boeing 787-9 in a deep indigo livery touched down at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and an hour and a half later it went back the way it came. Flight RX0873 from Riyadh, inbound. RX0874 to Riyadh, outbound. Every day...
Bahrain International Airshow Slips Two Years to 2028
Share this story In November 2024, the United States sent two B-52H bombers to fly over the Bahrain International Airshow. One of them then parked on the static display, the first time a B-52 had done so at Sakhir. Nobody pretended it was a routine appearance. It was...
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