Civil Aviation

In 1977, a tragic collision between two Boeing 747 jets (one operated by KLM and the other by Pan Am) in the Spanish Canary Island of Tenerife led to the death of 583 passengers. This accident is dubbed the deadliest accident in aviation. Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), which is now a standard feature in…

A bird strike is one of the most dangerous threats in aviation. Though precautions such as projecting dead birds (at the speed of sound) into engines during the testing phase, are taken into stride to ward off the most horrific effects of a bird striking a plane, a collision between a bird and a plane…

Sending rockets into space is expensive. The North American X-15, the hypersonic research program that was the first airplane to have touched space, cost $300 million in 1969 dollars, with each flight estimated to have cost $600,000. The cost of Ingenuity helicopter – the only chopper to have flown on a planet outside the Earth…

Air travel is one of the most convenient and popular modes of transportation, but sometimes conveniences also generate a significant amount of waste. Such is the case for paper cups that are used by various airlines. To help reduce such waste and protect our environment, some airlines are using reusable cups while flying. This small…

Ingenuity, a tiny helicopter with a mass of 1.8 kg (about 4 lbs) — weighing just 680 grams under Mars’s lighter gravity — made it to the surface of Mars, not only survived the frigidness of -85 degrees and the violent dust on the Martian surface, it fared surprisingly well on the planet that is…

India’s aviation has a history that began before the nation had shed off the skin of imperialism imposed on the nation by the British. In recent times, aviation in India has been marked by significant growth and modernization- though the closing of airspace during “Operation Sindoor” was a minor blip. In addition to devastating air…

  On 28th April 1988, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 was set to be a routine 35-minute inter-island flight in Hawaii. To put this into perspective, this duration is equivalent to the flight time to what is known as the most dangerous airport in the world, i.e., Lukla Airport, from Tribhuvan International Airport. The flight was…

Pokhara, which is the go-to city for tourists in Nepal, will forever be inextricably linked with the Pokhara International Airport project- something that reeks of allegations of exorbitant corruption and mismanagement. This vital aerodrome and one of the three international airpots in Nepal has an uncertain future, and almost no present. After all, it doesn’t…

Two weeks after the Pahalgam attack that saw twenty-six people killed in the Pahalgam region, India launched “Operation Sindoor”, which “targeted key strongholds of Jaish-e-Mohammed in Bahawalpur and Lashkar-e-Taiba in Muridke, among others.” Two of these organizations are “terror camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir”, claimed the Economic Times. While the aviation between the two…