April 2009 - Jim Fallows' Aviation blogs
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Two days ago I mentioned the strange results when an Air China flight headed for Beijing was instead diverted to Tianjin. To anyone who receives these posts by email, the results must have seemed even stranger than they were. Because of a glitch in our...
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... you have come to the right place. For completeness' sake, three more very informative links, the first two of them from immediately after the flight last week: 1) From the federal government's FocusFAA site, interviews with and pictures of...
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Twenty-plus years ago, traveling around China by air was anything but a peace-of-mind experience. The planes were mainly leftover Soviet junkers; the amenities were sparse; the general atmosphere called to mind Indiana Jones. I've done a lot of crisscrossing...
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Via the Naples News in Florida, this update on the first 14 minutes of transmissions between Douglas White, the low-time single-engine pilot who found himself in control of a twin-engine King Air whose pilot had just died, and the controllers who talked...
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I know this is not the major news story of the day. But it is what I find now jamming my email inbox, on reconnecting from the frontier of China, so I will note it for the record. I have always liked, admired, relied on, gotten along with, and been a...
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From Dave Kammeyer, a pilot-reader who was more impressed by the pilot-hero in this recent case than with the much-celebrated air traffic controller. I heard the audio of the King Air pilot the other day, and found it very interesting. You didn't...
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For real-life drama fans, the air traffic control tapes of Douglas White being talked through the landing of a King Air airplane, after the professional pilot dropped dead at the controls, are riveting and, to put it mildly, admirable. An AOPA Online...
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One of the heroes of my book Free Flight , and of this excerpted Atlantic cover story , was Alan Klapmeier, who with his brother Dale founded and ran the Cirrus Design aircraft company of Duluth, MN. Ten years ago, when I was spending time with them in...
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It's Lane Wallace's "No Map. No Guide. No Limits." here . Lane is well known in the aviation world as a columnist for Flying magazine and author of books on adventure, science, exploration, and so forth. I've known her as a friend...