How Airlines Price Tickets: Fare Classes, Buckets and Yield Management
Share this story Two passengers sit side by side in economy, same flight, same legroom, same sandwich. One paid several times what the other did. Neither was cheated, and neither was tracked by a cookie. They simply bought different products that happen to occupy...
Elly Beinhorn: The German Aviatrix Who Flew Around the World in 1932
Share this story Bushire, on the Persian Gulf, December 1931. An American pilot is working on his biplane when a battered Ford rolls out of the desert. In it, half-buried in dust, is a young woman looking for a mechanic. Her own aircraft is stranded up the coast with...
How Air Traffic Control Works: Tower, Approach and Center Explained
Share this story A domestic flight across the United States never belongs to one air traffic controller. It is passed from hand to hand like a baton: from a tower, to a radar room near the airport, to a string of en-route centres, and back down again at the other end....
Concorde’s Air Intakes: How Shock Waves Slowed Mach 2 Air for the Olympus
Share this story Concorde’s Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engines were turbojets, and like every jet engine their compressors needed subsonic air. At Mach 2 cruise, the air reaching the front of each nacelle was travelling at about 1,350 mph. The job of slowing...
Laker Skytrain 1977: The £59 Walk-On Fare That Changed Airlines
Share this story On the morning of 26 September 1977, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with the word Skytrain painted along its fuselage took off from London Gatwick for New York’s JFK. Its passengers had not booked their seats weeks in advance. They had turned up,...
How Does a Counter-Drone System Work? Detect, Track, Defeat
Share this story A cheap drone is a hard thing to stop. It is small, slow and low, which makes it difficult to see on radar, and it is so inexpensive that firing a conventional air defence missile at it is a losing trade. Since 2022 the war in Ukraine has turned that...
How Floatplanes Take Off From Water: Getting On the Step
Share this story A landplane accelerates down a smooth runway. A floatplane has to fight its way out of the water first, and water does not want to let go. The roar, the spray, the moment the nose drops and the aircraft suddenly skims like a speedboat: that is a...
Seat Pitch Explained: Pitch, Width, Recline and the FAA Seat Fight
Share this story Airline seat maps quote a number most passengers never think about until their knees meet the seat in front: seat pitch. It is the closest thing the industry has to a measure of how much room you get, and it is also widely misunderstood. Pitch is not...
Airplane Boarding Methods: Why It’s So Slow and Which Is Fastest
Share this story Everyone who flies knows the scene. Your group is called, you shuffle down the jet bridge, and then you stop. Somewhere ahead, someone is wrestling a roll-aboard into an overhead bin, and forty people wait behind them in a single-file aisle. Boarding...
Barnstormers: How 1920s Flying Circuses Sold America on Aviation
Share this story In the early 1920s, the first aeroplane most Americans ever saw up close landed in a farmer’s pasture. A young man in a leather helmet climbed out of a battered biplane, offered rides for a few dollars, and if the crowd was big enough, someone...
Recent Comments