Civil Aviation

When smoke from Canada’s wildfires in 2023 affected the visibility of US airspace, operations at laGuardia Airport came to a halt. Myrtle Beach International Airport suffered a similar fate when a suspected Chinese spy balloon made its way across the airport in the same year. In both of these cases, the Federal Aviation Authority issued…

Any person who has watched the movie “Catch Me If You Can” (or read the book of the same title) has been a witness to the most famous fictional pilot with the greatest number of deadheads – Frank Abegnale. What also helped Frank was the fact that he was, in his own admission, “a darkly…

How do we make sense of Bark Air, the airline which is “the world’s first air travel experience designed specifically for dogs first, and their human companions second”? All the non-human passengers are VIPS i.e., Very Important Pup,s that get first-class experience and are pampered in “a positively luxurious, curated experience”. Aviation already has a…

Airfone’s history is one where a potentially groundbreaking air-ground radiotelephone that could have revolutionized in-flight communication gets supplanted by something more groundbreaking. Created by John D. Goeken – the founder of MCI Communications- airfone allowed passengers to make phone calls from airplanes. It was a significant advancement in aviation technology in the early 1980s. At…

On January 15th, 2009, when a U.S Airline plane, Airbus A320-214 scheduled to take off from New York City to Seattle hit a flock of birds, the pilot had to bellyland the aircraft in the Hudson river, resulting in what has been dubbed “The Miracle on the Hudson”. Nine days prior to this incident, a…

While explaining the difference between a piece of fine art and science, Niel Degrasse Tyson, a great expositor of black holes and astronomy, said that if Einstein hadn’t come up with the idea of General Relativity(that would define Black Holes, and act as a great impediment for their study too, for General Relativity has no…

9/11, the horrific incident that issued a nationwide groundstop (perhaps the first and the only one in history) led to many changes in aviation security. After this attack, it became the norm for passengers getting onboard to take off their jackets, belts, shoes, belts, winter coats etc. (before walking through the metal detector) as a…

Aviation is rife with some unique vocabulary: ETOPS (Extended-range Twin-engine Operations Performance Standards) if often jocularly, colloquially referred to as “Engines Turn or Passengers Swim”, pilots assigned on certain duties are called “Deadheads”, “George” is the name given to the aircraft’s autopilot system, the Greenwich Meredian Time is known as “Zulu Time”,  a military aircraft…

A production number of 18,400 (between 1940 and 1945 across several variants) might not be enough to ensure that the Consolidated Aircraft B-24 Heavy Bomber is one of the most impressive planes to have been produced. After all, around 20,000-30,000 units of the Polikarpov Po-2, which is the tenth most-produced plane ever, were also manufactured…