Politicians, Planes, and Pilot Black Magic. Is This How Donald Trump Wins? The post My Election Curse appeared first on AskThePilot.com ..read more

The Three Most Important Planes in History. The post Top Flight appeared first on AskThePilot.com ..read more

July 15, 2024 Everyone’s talking about turbulence. Each week now, it seems, we’re reading about this or that flight getting wracked around by unusually rough air. People are being injured, flights are diverting. In one case a passenger died after a Singapore Airlines flight hit severe turbulence over Southeast Asia. Are dangerous turbulence encounters becoming more prevalent, or are they merely getting more attention? I honestly don’t know. That’s a bummer of an answer, but I’m unaware of any stats indicating things one way or the other. For now it’s all pretty anecdotal. That includes my own ..read more

July 18, 2024 DUBLIN, IRELAND My custom is to set my alarm an hour or so earlier than our scheduled wake-up. For coffee and Instagram and such. Having done so this morning, and now with nothing better to mull before the phone rings, it strikes that the name “Half & Half” is both redundant and meaningless. If a product is half of something, then it’s automatically half of something else, no? A single percentage sum, by itself, should take care of it, obviating any need for a second one. This product should be called “Half.” (Which, admittedly, doesn’t carry much of a ring.) Further, we a ..read more

April 23, 2019 DID YOU HEAR the one about the flight that went to Edinburgh instead of Dusseldorf? On March 25th, a British Airways regional jet took off from London City Airport (LCY) bound for Dusseldorf, Germany. An hour or so later, the passengers found themselves in Edinburgh, Scotland. Not until the jet touched down did they realize they were headed to the wrong city. Reporting on this incident has been inconsistent at best. Obviously certain outlets find the whole “the pilots flew to the wrong airport!” angle irresistible. But that isn’t what happened. The pilots, the flight attendants ..read more

May 27, 2024 IT WAS THE FRIDAY of Memorial Day weekend, 1979. I was in seventh grade, and a diehard airplane buff. It was a warm and sunny afternoon, and I was sitting in the dining room of the house I grew up in when the phone rang. It was a friend from school. He told me to turn on the television. It had been a sunny day in Chicago, too, when just after 3 p.m. American Airlines flight 191, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with 271 people on board, roared down runway 32L at O’Hare International Airport, headed for Los Angeles. Just as the plane lifted off, its left engine broke loose. The entire en ..read more

May 28, 2024 LAST WEEK, a passenger died and multiple more injured when a Singapore Airlines Boeing 777 encountered severe turbulence while en route from London to Singapore. The encounter happened over Myanmar and the flight diverted to Bangkok. Then, on May 26th, twelve people were hurt when a Qatar Airways jet hit severe turbulence during a flight to Dublin. The media is off and running, no doubt triggering panic among the many flyers for whom turbulence is an acute fear. If you’re one of those people, the first thing I can do is refer you to the turbulence essay found in the Q&A secti ..read more

When Culture and Air Travel Intersect Crossovers. That’s my name for those moments when history, culture, art or politics intersect unexpectedly with commercial aviation. They underscore the many ways, not always recognized, that air travel touches our lives. This will be an ongoing series. I’ll add to it as occasions warrant.   — NEW: AEROPOLITICS This one speaks for itself. A 767 of El Al, the Israeli carrier, buddy-buddy with an Iran Air 747 at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. I took this photo a decade ago, but the theme couldn’t be more timely. Was this by accident, do you think, or ..read more

April 11, 2024 THE PHOTO ABOVE was taken in Boston, a week or so ago in the newly expanded section of terminal E. The plane is an Airbus A340. But what’s important is that yellow box. See it, along the right edge of the main boarding door? Any guesses what it’s for? Turns out it’s a sort of dry-erase board — an empty placard onto which crewmembers can write greetings to the passengers. “Welcome aboard,” and that kind of thing. Maybe everyone signs their names, or someone draws a whimsical sketch of mountains or a palm tree, depending where you’re off to. On the interwebs you can see reels and ..read more

March 19, 2024 TEN YEARS AGO this month, Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared during a routine flight between Kuala Lumpur and Beijing. The wreckage was never found. There’s a solid chance the wreckage will never be found. And although that’s unfortunate, I think we can pretty well deduce what happened: the plane was intentionally brought down by one of the pilots, most likely the captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, in an act of murder-suicide. It was ditched somewhere in the Indian Ocean — landed, if you will, on the surface of the sea — where it sank to to the bottom and rests today, undetecte ..read more