The momentous occasion of Ed White performing the first American spacewalk was captured by the co-pilot of Gemini 4, James A. McDivitt. The caption of the photo should befittingly be Ed White’s joyous words while performing the “extra-vehicular activity,” (aka Space walking): “I feel like a million dollars”. Ed also commented that coming back to...

Bird strikes, or collisions between birds and aircraft, began when what is now referred to as “mechanical birds” tread upon the space of birds. The deadliest bird strike on a fixed-wing aircraft was recorded on October 4, 1960, and this incident involving a Lockheed L-188 Electra took the lives of 62 passengers on board. In...

Sometimes, the wispy white trails that follow an aircraft on its flight aren’t contrails but fuel that has been dumped by aircraft. This is also known as fuel jettison. Fuel dumping is a last-resort maneuver whereby a plane releases fuel in mid-air. This may seem environmentally unfriendly, but it is a critical safety measure in...

The iconic supersonic jet, Concorde, (which probably had an even more iconic flight number: BA001) concluded its 27-year service with a final landing at Filton runway in November 2003. An absence of commercial viability, public concerns about the plane’s noise ( the sonic boom ) alongside high levels of pollution, led to its demise.  Concorde...

In 2018, a Swedish social movement called flygskam, meaning “flight shame,” set out to make people feel guilty about boarding a plane. Seven years later, Sweden has scrapped the aviation tax it introduced at the movement’s peak, and global air travel closed out 2024 at a record high, according to a report by Flight Global...

The rise of sustainable travel, focusing on reducing our carbon footprint, brought about the concept of “flight shame”, which was better known as “flygskam”. Individuals who were concerned about the soaring levels of CO2 emissions associated with flights came up with another alternative movement known as ‘tågskryt’ – a word that is composed of the...

While the Lukla Airport is known as the Hillary Airport (with the name of the other mountaineer first to Everest-  Tenzing – often thrown in the mix as ‘Tenzing Hillary Airport’), it’s often news to a lot of people that this wasn’t the first (or the only) airport Sir Edmund Hillary had built in the...

Pradip Bashyal, a BBC journalist based in Kathmandu and writer of the brilliant book “Sherpa” shares his thoughts on the airport that is “considered one of the most dangerous airfields in the world”– Lukla: “The runway at this airport, which is a brief strip of just 527m (1,729ft) starting at the edge of a cliff...

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...