Insights, updates, and aviation stories.
Air France Flight 447 departed Rio de Janeiro’s Guarulhos Airport at 22:29 local time on June 1, 2009, bound for Paris Charles de Gaulle with 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board. Three and a half hours into the flight, as the Airbus A330 crossed the equatorial Atlantic at 35,000 feet, the autopilot disconnected. […]
The Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated as Lion Air Flight JT610 departed Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at 06:20 local time on October 29, 2018, with 181 passengers and 8 crew members on board. Twelve minutes later, it struck the Java Sea at high speed. There were no survivors. The Indonesian accident investigation authority, KNKT, found […]
United Airlines Flight 232 departed Denver Stapleton International Airport at 2:09 PM on July 19, 1989, bound for Philadelphia with a scheduled stop in Chicago. There were 285 passengers and 11 crew on board. Captain Al Haynes, 57, had been flying for United for 33 years. First Officer William Records and Second Officer Dudley Dvorak […]
Every airline ticket includes a one-letter fare class code that tells the airline exactly what you paid for. Not just which cabin you are in, but whether your ticket is refundable, how many miles you earn, and whether you are eligible for an upgrade. Economy alone has more than a dozen different codes, each representing […]
On the morning of April 28, 1988, Aloha Airlines Flight 243 departed Hilo Airport on the eastern tip of Hawaii for a routine interisland hop to Honolulu. The flight was expected to take about 35 minutes. The aircraft was a Boeing 737-200 that had been in service for 19 years, registration N73711, and had flown […]
Somewhere in the background of every flight you have ever taken, a set of voices you never heard was coordinating everything. The phrase “cleared for takeoff” that crackles through the cabin speaker represents the end of a chain of decisions made by people you will never meet, working in buildings you will never see, managing […]
If you have watched enough aviation documentaries, you have probably heard it: a sharp, synthetic voice cutting through cockpit audio saying “TCAS, climb, climb now.” It sounds alarming because it is. The Traffic Collision Avoidance System, known universally as TCAS, is the last automated safety net between two aircraft that are on a collision course. […]
There is a moment on most transatlantic flights when the moving map on your seatback screen stops showing familiar airways and city names. The aircraft is somewhere over the North Atlantic, it is probably the middle of the night, the cabin is dark, and the ocean below contains no airports, no landmarks, and no ground-based […]
Somewhere between the chime of the seat belt sign and the calm voice on the PA saying “ladies and gentlemen, we are diverting to an alternate airport,” a set of events has already been set in motion that most passengers will never see. A four-digit code has been dialed into a transponder. A radar target […]
When an airline announces a delay blamed on “ATC,” most passengers picture some abstract congestion, a queue in the sky, the routine friction of a busy system. What they less often picture is a controller working their sixth consecutive day, on a ten-hour shift, in a facility running at 60 percent of the staffing level […]