Dead Reckoning, LORAN and INS: How Pilots Fly Without GPS
Share this story The first sign is almost always the same. The magenta line on the navigation display does not vanish dramatically; it simply stops agreeing with itself. A position jumps a few miles sideways. The autopilot shrugs. Somewhere in the stack, a box decides...
Restarting a Jet Engine in Flight: Windmill Starts and Core Lock
Share this story When United Airlines flight UA946 had an engine problem over the North Atlantic last weekend, early reports could not agree on whether the engine was shut down for the rest of the flight or restarted on the way to Newfoundland. Either outcome is...
How Long Does an Airliner Last? Flight Hours, Cycles and Fatigue
Share this story Ask how old an airliner is and you will usually get an answer in years. Ask an engineer and you will get two more numbers: how many hours it has flown, and how many times it has taken off and landed. For the structure of an aircraft, those numbers...
Stratospheric Spies: Balloons, Solar Gliders and Pseudo-Satellites
Share this story Between the top of the weather and the bottom of space lies a band of sky that almost nobody uses. The stratosphere, roughly 18 to 30 kilometres up for the purposes of this story, is too high for airliners and most fighters, far below satellites, and...
Singapore Airlines Flight 006: Take-Off From a Closed Runway
Share this story Shortly after 11pm on 31 October 2000, a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400 lined up for take-off at Taipei in driving typhoon rain. The crew had been cleared to depart from runway 05L. They were on the wrong runway. The aircraft, flight SQ006 to Los...
Richard Heyser’s U-2 Flight That Started the Cuban Missile Crisis
Share this story At dawn on Sunday, 14 October 1962, a single grey reconnaissance jet crossed the Yucatán Channel at 72,500 feet and turned north towards western Cuba. Its pilot was Major Richard S. Heyser of the US Air Force. He was flying so high that he left no...
United 767 Engine Shutdown: UA946 Diverts to St. John’s
Share this story Four hours out of Washington, somewhere over the dark North Atlantic, the crew of United Airlines flight UA946 got the message no twin-jet pilot wants: a problem with one of their two engines. They declared an emergency, turned the Boeing 767 around,...
The 1-in-60 Rule and the 3-to-1 Descent: Pilot Mental Math
Share this story At 300 knots you are covering a nautical mile every twelve seconds. That is the governing constraint on every calculation a pilot does in the air: not whether an answer is exactly right, but whether it arrives before the situation it described has...
Henschel Hs 117 Schmetterling: Not the First SAM, but the Closest to Service
Share this story By 1943 Allied bomber streams were pounding German cities by day and night, and the Luftwaffe’s fighters and flak could not stop them. One answer was a weapon that did not yet exist anywhere: a guided missile fired from the ground at aircraft....
China’s Anti-Stealth Radars: Detection Is Not a Firing Solution
Share this story Every two years at Zhuhai, China parks a row of radar trucks on the apron and lets the world photograph them. The placards promise a great deal. Metre-wave arrays that see what microwave radars cannot. Passive sets that never transmit....
Recent Comments