Civil Aviation

Many female pilots have broken several aviation records. One of them is Evelyn Bryan Johnson, a colonel in the Civil Air Patrol, who was nicknamed “Mama Bird”. She logged 57,635.4 flying hours, equivalent to almost seven years of flight time. She also trained more pilots than anyone in history. Evelyn followed the footsteps of Raymonde…

What does (the Second World) war comprise of? If we are to study  R.N. Currey’s war poems, we know that elements such as “unplumbable courage”, “numb endurance”, “blind sacrifice”, and “high skill in homicide” are its quintessential elements. The world of aviation had sprung to life a few decades before the Second World War, the very…

The name is Tupolev Tu-144. In Russian, you’d call it Туполев Ту-144. The NATO reporting name for the Tu-144 is “Charger”. You might have other labels thrown at it: Concordski or the communist Concorde. For NASA, it was “a supersonic flying laboratory”. Given that the Tupolev Tu-144 was the first supersonic airliner to take to…

British Airways started the supersonic Concorde with the iconic flight number 001; Malaysia Airlines lost out 370 to an incomprehensible disaster when a flight vanished, possibly into the oceans, possibly not; Air India retired 171 following the deadliest accident in India in the recent times, United Airlines retired “93” and “175” after September eleventh, and American…

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…