A Navy Chief noticed something that needed to be done aboard ship. A new seaman he didn’t know stood nearby with his hand in his pockets. The Chief approached the seaman and barked at him, “What’s your name, sailor?” “John,” … Continue reading →
In May, 2010, an Air India Express 737-800 ran off the runway at Mangalore Airport, slid down a steep embankment and exploded in the jungle. The cockpit voice recorder provided a chilling picture of crew incompetence. As documented in a … Continue reading →
John Burch is a friend of mine, and he’s a nano-technology guy. Despite his best efforts to explain it to me, I have to tell you that he might as well be speaking in ancient tongues. That said, I do … Continue reading →
A friend of mine emailed me these three pictures. You might think they are of something out of a Jules Verne novel, but you’d be wrong. The Kalinin K-7 was a heavy experimental aircraft built in the Soviet Union in … Continue reading →
In a previous Single Ship Logbook post titled, “Regional Airline Safety Comes Under Fire,” I questioned the efficacy of a plan to increase the number of minimum flight hours required for a pilot to apply for a job with a … Continue reading →
The following is extracted from official records of the National Transportation Safety Board and is slightly edited for brevity: “On February 12, 2009, a Colgan Air, Inc., Bombardier DHC-8-400, operating as Continental Connection flight 3407, was on a night instrument … Continue reading →
I’m beginning the think the last couple of months might have been a period in which the planets aligned in such a way to create very unusual happenings in aviation. Example #1: In the democratic Republic of Congo, a 19-passenger … Continue reading →
As a pilot for almost fifty years, I’d really like to believe that aviators are a cut above the rest of humanity . . . steely-eyed, confident, capable of amazing feats that humble lesser individuals. But after reading an article … Continue reading →
To any non-flyers who might read this, the title of this post does not refer to dark clouds dumping water on my head while flying an airplane. In the “old” days (and that doesn’t mean at the time of the … Continue reading →
My wife and I enjoy flying to small airports with restaurants for what pilots commonly refer to as the “$100 hamburger.” Yesterday’s gorgeous weather lured us to the San Marcos Municipal Airport, where we got in our RV-6 and took … Continue reading →
