Modern Aviation
An era from 1991 to the present marked by achievements in air and space flight, including unmanned aerial vehicles and the International Space Station
Fire Hazard
Where there’s smoke, there’s pollution. How can airport firefighters green it up?
July 2009 |
By Sam Goldberg
Unmanned Traffic Jam
To the Federal Aviation Administration, civilian
UAVs are the new barbarians at the gate.
July 2009 |
By Douglas Gantenbein
Pundamentals of flight
If Broadway entrepreneurs were to adapt Wolfgang Langewiesche's classic tutorial for the stage, it would be retitled...."Shtick and Rudder."Posted in honor of the late Master Punner Donald S. Lopez
June 09, 2009 |
By Pat Trenner
"Miracle on the Hudson" hearings this week
The National Transportation Safety Board is holding three days of public hearings this week on the ditching of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson last January. The hearings will be webcast live here.
June 09, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Flight 447: Small airplane, big ocean
Now that searchers have found wreckage from Air France Flight 447, we can hope they’ll also locate the data recorders and solve the mystery of what happened, which could lead to safety improvements on future flights.But earlier this week, it appeared that just locating the downed airliner in thousa...
June 03, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Flight 447: Was it turbulence?
We're still in that spooked stage following the disappearance of Air France flight 447 off the coast of Brazil in the early morning hours of June 1, UTC. What's so spooky is that airplanes don't just fall out of the sky. Why this one did is far from being solved. According to a recent Boeing study,...
June 02, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
Sullymania
Captain Chesley Sullenberger was thrust into the media spotlight in January, when he landed his stricken Airbus in the Hudson River and the aircrew evacuated all passengers, largely uninjured, to safety within minutes. A remarkable piece of airmanship by the entire crew, to be sure. But since then,...
May 27, 2009 |
By Pat Trenner
The Great North Dakota Dash
I just read the manuscript for a book to be published in the spring of 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Never Land: Adventures, Wonder, and One World Record in a Very Small Plane is written by Scott Olsen, whose most recent book is Hard Air: Adventures from the Edge of Flying. (Disclosure...
May 14, 2009 |
By Pat Trenner
Cracking down on "laser losers"
The advent of cheap, powerful hand-held lasers has become a real problem for aviation, with daily reports of pranksters (or, according to various headlines, "thugs," "idiots" and "laser losers") shining laser penlights into cockpits and temporarily blinding pilots. The number of incidents is on the...
May 07, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Goodwill Mission
To residents of Florida’s Gulf Coast, the Joint Strike Fighter says “Won’t you be my neighbor?”
April 24, 2009 |
By Richard P. Hallion
FAA relents, will make bird strike data public
Bowing to outside pressure, most recently from the National Transportation Safety Board, the Federal Aviation Administration has decided to make public its full database on airplane birdstrikes. The information will be online beginning Friday morning, although the database won't be fully searchable...
April 23, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Johns Hopkins tops aero research schools
What's the top aerospace engineering school in the country? Depends on how you measure it, of course, but if you're ranking on the basis of who spends the most on research and development (as the National Science Foundation does each year), then first place goes to Johns Hopkins University in Balti...
April 16, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Le Airbag de Moi
Zut! Don't look for it on the fashion runways of Paris just yet. Perhaps on the autoroute first. See, it's not always aviation stuff that grabs me. It's the occasional diversion. Such as the wearable airbag.I was perusing www.helite.com because this little French company outside Dijon, city of mout...
April 15, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
How is a volcano like a jet engine?
Answer: In the sound it makes when erupting. Or rather, the infrasound—the low-frequency rumble just below the range of human hearing.Robin Matoza, a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues used infrasound arrays to record eruptions at...
April 13, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
Marine One
Meet J.T. Bachmann, the first USMC pilot to fly the Joint Strike Fighter.
April 09, 2009 |
By Michael Klesius
And the Top-Ranked Airline Is...
The 19th annual Airline Quality Rating has just been released by researchers at St. Louis University and Wichita State University, and the news is...pick your adjective: encouraging, surprising, suspect, generous, exaggerrated, overdue, no-way-this-can-be-true, whatever. This is because the report ...
April 07, 2009 |
By Mike Klesius
"Dude, you both went 'Whoaaah!' and I was like 'Nooooo!!' "
Never mind that the guy in this video sounds like the turtle in Finding Nemo ("He was killin' it, and you were killin' it, I was comin' down, and Dude, you both went 'Whoaaah!' and I was like 'Nooooo!!'") This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time: wingsuit flyers Jeff Nebelkopf and...
March 26, 2009 |
By Tony Reichhardt
