Civil Aviation

A report from Forbes pointed out that 2024 was “the deadliest in commercial aviation in six years.” This came against a backdrop of 2023 being the safest year for flying (as reported by IATA). 2025 has seen a number of crashes already- the most notable of them all being the collision between an American Airlines…

Giant airplanes are constructed taking a variety of factors into consideration. Monsters like the whale-ish Airbus Beluga were devised with transporting parts of the Airbus in mind. There are aircraft like the Caspian Sea Monster, which are frightening pieces of engineering built with combat at the helms. Some of the biggest passenger aircraft in the…

Some of the largest airports in the world stretch up to 774 square kilometers. This is almost twice the size of the biggest nation without an airport! The shortest commercial airport in the world, the Juancho E. Irausquin Airport, located on a Caribbean island called Saba, has a width of nearly 400 meters. What is…

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The Internet- the place that fulfills the dream of every “unpublished writer” or the “unpublishable one,”- as Christopher Hitchens once memorably said.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…