NTSB: 21 Air 767 Touched Down on Miami Runway 30 at 158 Knots
On 9 September the National Transportation Safety Board published the first hard numbers from the Miami accident. They are not a verdict. They are a list of times, speeds and annunciations read off two recorders in a laboratory in Washington, and the agency attached...
Europe’s Most Extreme Airports: Highest, Steepest, Shortest
The timetable at Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides is not fixed. It cannot be. The runway is a beach, and twice a day the Atlantic covers it. The United Kingdom’s aeronautical information publication states the position without drama: aerodrome availability is...
The 70/50 Takeoff Rule: What the FAA Says and Where It Fails
Halfway down the runway, the decision is already made. Either the aeroplane is accelerating the way the handbook said it would, or it is not, and in the second case the only variable left is how much runway remains to stop in. The 70/50 rule exists to force that...
Shortest Takeoff Distance: From Valdez STOL Records to Airliners
Pioneer Field sits at sea level on the edge of Prince William Sound, and every May a steady breeze rolls in off the water. On 12 May 2018 that breeze was blowing 12 to 15 knots straight down the runway when Frank Knapp lined up a yellow, slat-winged Piper Cub that...
Fin Markings Decoded: What Air Force Tail Codes Mean
Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person strapped into it...
Operation Yellow Ribbon: The Day Gander Took 6,600 Strangers
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 crossing the...
Varna: A Bus Hit a TUI fly Belgium 737 MAX Wing
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 fast, not...
Air Force One: A Slide Inflated Before Trump Could Board
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 most common...
NATS Outage: 2,000 UK Flights Cancelled, and a One-Week Deadline
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 flights, a week-long...
United Airlines Cancels Its Denver 9/11 Flyover
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, escorted by four F-16...
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