December 31, 2009 – 7:16 pm
An American health reporter has explained what would have really happened if the underpants bomb had detonated as planned last Friday on the Delta flight approaching Detroit. The jet would have landed unharmed, but quite a few of the passengers would be combing bits of terrorist testicles or buttocks from their hair after landing, or [...]
December 31, 2009 – 2:36 pm
A drive in the highlands this morning was more memorable for a lack of numeracy on the airwaves than the spectacle of too many cars being driven at autobahn speeds on two lane country ‘roads’. This isn’t the last day of the first decade of the third millennium, or the 21st century, but it did [...]
December 30, 2009 – 5:22 pm
Given the uproar caused by Irish bookmaker Paddy Power running a book on airlines going broke, what odds might be given on Qantas or Virgin Blue going bust? No, Plane Talking isn’t a bookmaker, and isn’t going to hazard a guess, with emphasis on the word ‘hazard’. But readers will see the UK stories and [...]
December 30, 2009 – 10:54 am
New ways of beating the heat barrier to sustained hypersonic flight are being researched at the University of Queensland. They involve composite materials that could replenish the critical heat abraded surfaces of a vehicle flying at eight times the speed of sound and allow it to reach European cities from Australia in as little as [...]
December 29, 2009 – 7:12 pm
Anyone curious about the failures of public administration in the US in relation to terrorism might find the collaborative legal weblog the Volokh Conspiracy a useful resource. The site is operated by UCLA Law School Professor Eugene Volokh. It published (as reproduced below) the directive from the US transportation security agency the TSA , soon [...]
December 28, 2009 – 1:38 pm
The holiday media excitement over a ‘near miss’ between a Cathay Pacific A330-300 and a Virgin Blue 737-800 south of Darwin last Tuesday was in fact a ‘far miss’. This is how it is summarised by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau under its Level 5 investigation category. An Airbus Industrie A330 was southbound at FL370 [...]
December 27, 2009 – 7:32 am
There are some very strange elements emerging in reports of the attempted bombing of a Delta Airlines flight as it approached Detroit airport from Amsterdam on Christmas Day. One is that the screening measures in place at major airports including those in Australia should have detected one or more of the components of the attack [...]
December 27, 2009 – 6:31 am
A selection of images of the American Airlines Boeing 737-800 that crashed off the end of the runway at Kingston, Jamaica, in a heavy rain storm late at night on December 22 local time. The jet was carrying 160 people of which 40 were injured. Shortly after the crash an American Airlines source was quoted [...]
December 24, 2009 – 2:37 pm
May the snow ploughs make the frozen ways clear and straight. May it really be your winter coat when 100 identically coated passengers exit the same jet in far northern places. May the reservations system assign a different seat number to each of the 398 other passengers on your flight, and not give you all [...]
December 23, 2009 – 11:13 am
Jetstar’s move to sell access to the forward seat rows for a $5 surcharge on its cheapest fares may be a relief to those who have flown on low cost airlines in other parts of the world. On Ryanair, easyJet and WizzAir for example, you pay about the same as an extra charge just to [...]
