Over the years, many aircraft disappearances have baffled the world of aviation. The most obvious, and perhaps the most harrowing of them was the disppearance of Malaysian Airlines MH 370. Another noteworthy incident is the disappearance of Uruguayan Airlines Flight 571, which was later discovered, only to leave the world in bewilderment, for the case...

The highest ever recorded bird strike (i.e., a collision of a bird and an aircraft) occurred over the West African coast when an Air Ivory Coast aircraft struck a vulture at a staggering height of 37,000 feet – an altitude which is almost 8,000 ft greater than the height of Mount Everest...

The word “Lukla” in the Sherpa language refers to an “abode of sheep”. Locals say that in the past, the region was rife with this creature, though one would find it next to impossible to locate it these days in the “most-dangerous airport” region. Before the construction of Lula’s iconic airport (LUA), which has been...

If one makes the effort of trying to simplify what the term Dutch Roll means in aviation, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth, if we imagine thought of it as “swaying”. But this simplification means that we wouldn’t be too far from falsehoods either. After all, the English word “swaying” has a lot...

The story of the Tupolev Tu-104, USSR’s first jetliner, goes hand in hand with its arch, or should we say, its only rival (albeit, only initially), the deHavilland Comet. In May 1952, Britain had introduced the de Havilland DH106 Comet – the world’s first jetliner – into passenger service. Amidst the elan, tragedy followed. A...

After the former Syrian leader was ousted from the government, he chose to fly to Russia on the Ilyushin Il-76. In addition to aiding a flailing ex-president, the this versatile Soviet strategic transport aircraft has c6.5 tons of supplies for constructing a new winter complex at the Vostok station near Russia’s Novolazarevskaya outpost in Antarctica...

It can be a surprise to learn that students of aviation have had to write scientific papers titled “Seat Belts are not dangerous”. While this may sound farcical, or even facetious, the author of the paper was Eugene F. Duboid, an Emeritus Professor of Physiology at the Cornell University Medical College. Dubois was also the...

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...

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...