Technique

Thanks to a big kick from the jet stream, Norwegian Airlines is laying claim to the fastest non-Concorde airline flight between New York and London (Gatwick). The Boeing 787-9 hit a top groundspeed of 674 knots and made it to the airport just south of London in five hours and 13 minutes on Monday, almost […]

The FAA says it’s satisfied by measures undertaken by Transport Canada and Air Canada to address a couple of serious errors by Air Canada crews at San Francisco International Airport in 2017. In July, an Airbus A320 came close to landing on a taxiway occupied by four widebody airliners waiting to take off and in […]

An Aeromexico Boeing 737 lined up for the wrong runway at San Francisco International Airport last week in the third landing miscue at SFO in six months. The crew accepted a clearance for Runway 28R but set up for 28L instead. There was a Virgin America flight on 28L waiting to take off. Controllers saw […]

The pilot who landed an Air Canada A320 at San Francisco Airport in October after being ordered to go around told FAA investigators the radio was set to the wrong frequency. Documents obtained by the Toronto Globe and Mail under a freedom of information request said the unidentified pilot, who is based in Vancouver, said […]

Turkish authorities say they still aren’t sure why a Pegasus Airlines Boeing 737 suddenly veered left at the end of its landing run and ended up hanging off the edge of a steep bank over the Black Sea late Saturday. The aircraft, which was on flight from the capital city of Ankara to Trabzon, on […]

Some years ago, I had one of those “what in the world are they thinking?” conversations with a pilot who was towing gliders as a volunteer for the Civil Air Patrol. While he thought it was important to volunteer for a good group, he was ready to quit because of a screwy power reduction procedure […]

A Cessna Caravan carrying ten American passengers and two Costa Rican crew crashed and burned in Costa Rica on New Year’s Eve, killing all on board. The passengers included Bruce and Irene Steinberg, of Scarsdale, New York. The other passengers were not identified but the State Department confirmed they were American. All that remained of […]

Six people died in the New Year’s Eve crash of a De Havilland Beaver seaplane in Australia. The aircraft, operated by Sydney Seaplanes, was being used to shuttle passengers to a waterside restaurant and crashed on the Hawkesbury River, just north of Sydney, about 3:10 p.m. In addition to the pilot there were reportedly at […]

The potential for in-flight icing during an IFR flight—regardless of whether the airplane is approved for flight into known icing or not—means doing serious plotting and scheming prior to departure, and throughout the flight. As has been demonstrated for years, structural icing does bad things to airframes. Best to presume every cloud will contain ice, […]

When I was in junior high and going to Air Explorer meetings at the Des Moines Airport, I was like every other kid in our group. During breaks from the private pilot ground school, we’d go into the maintenance hangars and out on the ramp to get close to the airplanes that we dreamed of […]