Civil Aviation

Most airliners still look like a tube with wings bolted onto it. That shape has stayed almost unchanged since the Boeing 707 flew in 1957. A double delta blended wing body aircraft breaks that pattern entirely, merging the wing and fuselage into one continuous lifting surface. The concept has moved from wind tunnels to real…

A length of 92 meters. A wingspan of 37.6 meters. As many as eight engines in its bilaterally symmetrical body. A wingship. A flarecraft. Something as bulky as 240,000 kilograms when empty. Something that was quietly perched above the surface of the waters but not as much as your typical aircraft. As the largest aircraft…

From 2017 onwards, the aviation industry saw a lot of words added to its lexicon. One was “flygskam” referring to “flight-shaming” i.e. an anti-flying movement started to reduce the environmental impact of aviation. We then had “Tågskryt”– another Swedish word that literally means “train brag” encouraging people to “brag” for taking trains as their mode…

The Internet- the place that fulfills the dream of every “unpublished writer” or the “unpublishable one,”- as Christopher Hitchens once memorably said. It is the same place where true daredevils have performed, if not “death-defying,” certainly near-death stunts such as the World Record supersonic freefall. The Internet, a pocket of space of which is YouTube…

Concorde was one aircraft whose sleek, luxury, and speed have not yet found a worthy replacement. Aviation lovers are nostalgic about the times it just glided through the skies at twice the speed of sound. Much like many beauties, it had its rival- the Tupolev Tu-144, which debuted two months before the Concorde and was…

“Remove Before Flight” is a nifty, powerful badge (a “tag” rather) that plays a vital role in ensuring safe air travel. A passenger aboard an aircraft might not have seen the “Remove Before Flight” tag as it is, as the name suggests, “removed before the aircraft is about to take off”. But a person working…

Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (MRIA) is located in the Hambantota district, which houses a town called “Mattala”- after which this emptiest airport in the world is named. The other word in the name of the airport- “Rajapaksha”- comes from the name of the Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksha who opened the airstrip in 2013.  One…

Apart from having a visual distinction of being a metal monster, the Russian aircraft Kalinin K-7 is a brilliant example of a creative flying machine. Developed in the early 1930s, Kalinin K-7 was designed with a unique form consisting of booms, sizable underwing pods, fixed landing gear, and machine gun turrets inside the pods. It…

The word “Aviation” is cognate with “Aves”- the word with which we describe the animals that take to the skies. And it is this dream of taking to the skies, possibly beyond the horizon where a word like “sky” is rendered meaningless, is what captures the imagination of billions of people. And these creative, imaginative…