Bombardier 415...

Nice video of Bombardier 415s in action – the only airplane designed from the ground up for fire-fighting.  Via reader and blog friend Simi L.:

Beauty on the Wing...

Reader, friend, and former colleague Doug S. passes along this site with beautiful photography.  The photographer is Karim Nafatni, a Dubai-based A320 commercial airliner pilot.  Many of his photographs (like the one at right) are taken from the cockpit of the airplane he's flying.  There's a story about him, and he has a web site with lots of photos.  Some gorgeous stuff here...

B-36...

The B-36 “Peacemaker” bomber was an enormous post-WWII strategic bomber – the first designed to carry nuclear weapons.  The design of the B-36 eventually evolved into a configuration with 6 huge radial piston engines and 4 jet engines – 10 engines in all. 

The flight engineer's station on B-36 was an awesomely complex collection of switches, dials, indicators, and controls.  Here's a terrific virtual tour of that flight engineer's station, that lets you look all around.

Via reader Simi L...

Exploding Toilet...

Very funny story, at least allegedly true, about an exploding toilet on a cargo flight.  An excerpt:

He turns and looks at the toilet. But it has, for all practical purposes, disappeared. Where it once rested he now finds what can best be described only as a vision. In place of the commode roars a fluorescent blue waterfall — a huge, heaving cascade of toilet fluid thrust waist-high into the air and splashing into all four corners of the lavatory. Pouring from the top of this volcano, like smoke out of a factory chimney, is a rapidly spreading pall of what looks like steam.

Read the whole thing here...

Dragon Dreams...

It looks likely that giant aeroships will sail the skies again, in the not too distant future...

Last Words...

Here's a morbidly fascinating collection of transcripts (and in some cases, recordings) of the last words from the crews of airplanes that crashed.

The All American, a B-17...

This particular B-17 survived a mid-air collision with a German fighter over the docks of Tunis.  Amazingly the pilot managed to land the badly-damaged aircraft, and not a single crew member was injured at all.

I'd never heard this story before.  Read all about it...

Internet Follies...

Reader Simon M. sent me a collection of photos featuring a three-carrier task group and some photos of the F/A-37 Talon (one of them at right).  The description waxed poetic about this plane's capabilities, and the photographs show an exotic and downright predatory looking aircraft.  This is an area I'm interested in (aviation in general, and military aviation in particular), so I was surprised that I'd never heard of this plane before.

Turns out that's because the plane is fictional – from Hollywood (the 2005 movie Stealth). 

The way the Internet allows anyone to stand up and talk to the world is wonderful.  But it has its downsides...including the amazing number of people who seem to spend their days carefully crafting websites and documents to say things that just aren't true.  Sometimes what they're saying is pushing some sort of agenda, so at least one can understand their motivation while deploring their actions.  But this sort of fakery?  What on earth motivates someone to spend time doing this, I wonder?  

Every Inch Matters...

Passed along by my mom.  All I can say is “Yikes!”

Flight 447: the Rest of the Story...

Popular Mechanics has a great summary of what really happened in the crash of Air France's flight 447 two years ago off the coast of Brazil.  Bottom line: profound pilot error combined with an apparent lack of understanding of how the automated flight systems on board their Airbus 330.  Some of the pilot errors were apparently caused by the pilots expecting the plane's flight control systems to work like older, less automated systems worked.  Said another way, the pilots appeared to be unprepared to handle the complexities of their automated flight controls.

This is a problem familiar to any modern software developer: users, in general, have little idea how the software they use actually works.  It's common – in fact, normal – for the users' mental model of the software package to be badly flawed.  For most kinds of software, the outcome of this is frustrated users and angry tech support calls.  This is not the case for flight control software, as this article makes very clear...

Iranian Plane Crash...

A mid-air crash a couple years ago took out their only AWACS-capable aircraft.  This clip, apparently taken from a nearby tanker aircraft, captures the aftermath...

360° Helicopter Cockpit...

Fascinating.  Via reader Dr. Simi L...

Flight Data Recorder Found...

Air France Flight 447 went down off the coast of Brazil almost two years ago.  Yesterday robotic submersibles found and recovered the memory unit from its flight data recorder.  Investigators are very hopeful that with this data they will be able to reconstruct exactly what caused the accident.  To date there is one main suspect (iced over pitot tubes) and several other possibilities.  We wish them good fortune in their search...