I saw this on reddit this morning just had to laugh. You might remember when this accident happened: 8 years ago today. The Southwest flight from Vegas overran the runway at Burbank and ended up right next to this gas station, and THIS is what we take from it now?!

Original source: http://themot.org/gallery/d/45773-2/gas_prices.jpg

It was a short 22 years ago today that the space shuttle Challenger exploded during its ascent, and the word “o-ring” entered our everyday vocabulary. As we all know, all seven astronauts died. Here is a shot of the bird during happier days.

I was in third grade at the time, and I remember being outside during recess when my friend came running out with the news. None of us believed him. Our logic said that if we could always hear the shuttle when it landed (at least, we could hear the sonic booms), then we certainly would have heard the shuttle explode. I suppose we forgot that it launched in Florida and NOT California.

When we returned to the classroom, our teacher sat us all down and explained what had happened, or at least what she knew. Then we watched it on television. Many of us were Young Astronauts, and we were all devastated. There are only a handful of national tragedies that make such an impression that you remember them clearly for as long as you live. This was the first to impact me in that way.

So, let’s all remember the crew of STS-51L. Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judith Resnik all lost their lives on January 28, 1986.

The Gimli Glider, one of the greatest “feel good” stories in aviation history, was retired by Air Canada yesterday. The plane flew from Montreal to Tucson before heading to Mojave where it will probably meet its fate as a bunch of Molson cans. Actually, there is hope that someone will rescue it, but the future is up in the air right now.

For those who don’t know, you’ll be surprised to hear the the Gimli Glider was not some newfangled type of aircraft. It was just a 767-200. Actually, it was this ship:

What you’ll be amazed to know is that back in 1983, it ran out of fuel at cruising altitude due to an error converting between metric and imperial measurements. The skilled crew was able to glide the airplane down for over 100 miles, line up with an old abandoned military runway that was being used for go-kart races at that instant, and successfully bring the plane back to Earth without killing a single person. Sure the nose gear collapsed, but the plane was to be repaired and fly for 25 more years.

Where is Gimli, you ask? It’s about 55 miles north of Winnipeg. Where is Winnipeg? Find the border between North Dakota and Minnesota and head north.

If you’d like some more reading on this topic, there’s a good article on the retirement here. You can also buy a book and a movie that were made on the subject.

If you’re traveling through London/Heathrow today, you might want to call your airline and see if things are running on time. They haven’t exactly had the best of luck there these last couple of days.

See, yesterday a British Airways 777 landed on the grass before it got to the concrete, skidded, and ended up stopping right at the threshold to one of Heathrow’s two runways, as you can see below.

Everyone got off ok, and that’s pretty amazing. I spent the day yesterday going back and forth with a bunch of airline dork friends discussing what could have possibly caused this to happen. The weather was good and there weren’t any visibility issues, so that’s unlikely to have been the problem. There were reports that the engines failed, so what would have caused it? Did it run out of fuel? Maybe, though unlikely. It didn’t catch on fire, so that’s always possible.

I know, I should really keep out of this whole speculation game. Remember that potential “undular bore” that the Air Canada plane may have hit? Well, there are now reports that it could have been wake turbulence from a 747 passing in front of it. Not nearly as interesting, but certainly plausible. So, it makes me want to reserve judgment on this accident even though it’s so interesting.

The Daily Mail, however, has no problem speculating that it may have been a bird strike that shut down both engines simultaneously just a minute before landing. They have a bunch of incredible pictures and more details on the site. The odds of that seem so unbelievably small. It made me wonder which was more unlikely: that scenario or Randy Johnson hitting a bird over home plate with his fastball a few years back.

Well, it doesn’t matter. They’ll figure it out soon enough, I’m sure. It’s interesting to note that this is the first major accident I can think of involving a 777. That’s a very long and impressive safety record.

But back to my original point. That plane is still sitting at the threshold to the runway, so it may cause delays. Right now, I believe the runway is open to departing flights. (”And please don’t look to your right, ladies and gentlemen.”) Yesterday, when the runway was closed, most short haul flights were canceled or diverted so that long hauls could run. I imagine that the runway may need to close on and off for investigation and removal, so short haul flights may be affected again.

If you’ve been reading the blog for awhile, you might have noticed that I’m kind of a weather wonk as well as an airline dork. So I was really interested to see that a recent Air Canada flight that hit turbulence may have encountered an undular bore. What the heck is that?

You may have heard about this flight. An Air Canada A319 was going from Victoria to Toronto when something happened and the plane had to make an emergency landing in Calgary. At least 10 people were injured, but not much other information has been released, except that there was a computer problem.

I read a post in the Turbulence Forecast blog today pointing to an article saying that it could have been a rare atmospheric (aka undular) bore that caused turbulence severe enough that it impacted the computers (or more likely just knocked out the autopilot).

I had visions of a giant tidal wave in the sky crashing down on the plane, but admittedly, I had no idea what an atmospheric bore was at all. Turns out I wasn’t quite right. A little research brought me to this fascinating blog post from ABC 33/40 in Birmingham, Alabama of all places. Now, I’m a huge fan of true weather wonks. I regularly read Tom Skilling’s blog for WGN in Chicago, and I used to really like watching Sean McLaughlin when he worked for channel 12 in Phoenix. After reading this post by Tim Coleman in Alabama, I think I’ve found another weather geek to follow.

Tim explains the undular bore phenomenon very well. Basically, when a warm air mass comes into contact with a cool, stable air mass (or vice versa?), they can create waves in the air similar to what you’d see when you drop a pebble into a body of water, only these waves move at 10 to 50 mph. The tops of those waves will have winds going one way while the bottoms may be going another way. On October 3, 2007, a webcam caught an amazing view of one of these undular bores. Check it out.

Watch the trees at the very beginning. As the waves roll by, the winds quickly shift direction. That’s just cool. But this post makes it sound like this isn’t the rarest event. It actually happens quite often, though you often can’t see it because there are no clouds to show it. That’s a stark contrast to the original article saying it’s an extremely rare event. Maybe it’s only rare at such high altitude. I’m just not sure. Pretty cool stuff though, huh?

I’m just glad I didn’t have fly through it. Then again, it’s nice to know that flying through such violent air only resulted in some minor injuries and the plane landed safely.

If you’ve ever questioned why better visibility around the airport is so important, take a look at this video depicting a near-disaster in Providence last year. (Thanks to Vanity Fair Musings via Don Brown at Get the Flick.

If that doesn’t make you crap your pants, I’m not sure what will. There are just so many problems here that could have been avoided with ground-based radar. It’s a foggy night in Providence so you can’t see much outside. The United pilots get lost on landing and incorrectly state their location as being near inactive runway 25R instead of active runway 25L. That’s bad enough to cause problems. Meanwhile, the controller really blows it. Despite the aircraft saying they were near Taxiway Kilo and hearing a plane fly right overhead, the controller doesn’t pick up that they must be nowhere near runway 23R and on 23L instead.

The hero here? Obviously the US Airways pilots. Had they departed as directed by the controller, they very well could have taken the top off that United aircraft . . . or worse. Fortunately they had the good sense to wait the whole thing out until everyone knew where everyone else was. Wow.

Coming from the capital of runway incursions here in LA, I certainly hope we can get some funding together for better coverage of what’s happening on the ground.

Airplane, meet truck. Truck, fall over and play dead. That’s the gist of what you’ll see if you watch this video of a South African Airways 737-800 landing in Lusaka, Zambia. A reader of the blog alerted me to this a couple days ago, and I definitely think it’s worth a look. The impact happens just after the one minute mark.

This thread questions who is ultimately at fault, and I’d have to go with the pilot on this one. I mean, the truck may not have been parked in the right place, but it was NOT MOVING. Then again, an Enterprise shuttle van hit my stopped car at the airport earlier this year and they’re saying it’s not their fault, so who knows. (Note to everyone: Don’t rent from Enterprise)

Most interesting to me is this Lusaka Times article that says it was ship ZS-SJD. If they’re right, and they may not be considering they misidentified the 737-800 as a 737-700, then this is the exact plane I flew out of Lusaka back to Johannesburg back in December 2003. Neat.

Christmas trees are going up, shopping season is kicking into high gear, and the weather is getting chillier. Ah yes, it’s time for winter. Now, that doesn’t mean much here in LA where it’s a rare cold night when the temperature heads below freezing, but for the rest of the country, it requires bigger changes.

In places like Denver, it’s time to prepare for snow. And at Denver International Airport, it means hiring seasonal employees to handle the de-icing operation. As you probably know, when airplanes gather ice on their wings, bad things happen because planes lose lift. One of the most infamous icing accidents involved Air Florida flight 90departing Washington/National. Departure delays meant ice built up on the wings, and the pilots mistakenly tried to depart without further de-icing, the plane couldn’t climb and it crashed into the 14th St Bridge in Washington DC.

Obviously, de-icing is a serious business, but the airlines don’t generally handle it themselves. They contract with third parties who handle the seasonal task. So, when channel 4 in Denver starting hearing from “someone inside” Servisair, one of the companies that handles de-icing, that there were improprieties in the hiring process, they had one of their people go under cover and apply for a job.

As you might have guessed, it hasn’t turned out well. The first part included links to videos showing the examiners feeding all the answers to the applicants so that they could pass each airline’s test. Hmm, that doesn’t sound good. There were also other violations discussed in part 2.

Clearly, this is a bad thing. When you’re de-icing, you get up close to aircraft and you have access to the secure part of the airfield, so there needs to be a great deal of training involved. But is it a danger to the aircraft that get de-iced?

It could be. A report from 1993 (yes it’s old) recommended that pilots always double check the wings after de-icing to make sure that they’re clean. The report said that there were cases where pilots did not do that, leading them to depart with some wing contamination. So, if the de-icing crew is not as well-versed in de-icing as they need to be and the pilots don’t check the wings themselves, there could be problems.

This report was in 1993, and I would hope there have been changes since that time, but I don’t know for sure. Any pilots out there who can speak to this?

The company says this is not policy (duh), but I wonder how long this has been going on. Looking back, I couldn’t find a de-icing accident at Denver since a Continental DC-9 crashed on takeoff in November 1987. So even if this has been going on for up to 20 years, it hasn’t caused any de-icing problems in that time. Still, it doesn’t exactly sit well.

You have to love the Danes. It’s cold and dark for much of the year up there, so you know it has to be their sense of humor that gets them through until summer. This time, it’s the Q400 that’s in their sights after having several landing gear problems on SAS-operated flights.

Danish media conglomerate DR has put up a new game on its website called Dash ‘n Crash. For those who only know the Q400 by its short name, this might not be that funny. The airplane’s full name is the Dash 8 Q400. Ah, yes. You know this is going to be fun.

As the game asks, “Tør du lande et Dash-fly?” In English, I believe that translates to “Isn’t flying the Dash 8 more fun than eating pickled herring?” And oh yes, it is. I’m guessing your interest won’t last long when you realize it is impossible to land the Q400 without the gear either collapsing or falling off the airplane entirely. Sweet. Have at it yourself:

If you’ve been watching the news over the last 24 hours, you’ve probably seen countless reports about the Sri Lankan plane that was *gasp* going to fly after it’s winglet sliced into the winglet of a British Airways plane. The reports, which apparently started with this Daily Mail story, make it sound like they were going to fly the plane with its wing missing. And if it wasn’t scary enough with text, they included this picture which appears to imply that the circled winglet belonged to the Sri Lankan plane.

How much more irresponsible can you get?

First off, most airplanes can fly without their winglets. The story says that the plane flew the route a day later. That’s plenty of time to inspect the wing, make sure only the winglet was damaged, and then remove it. The plane can fly with just one winglet with no trouble at all.

Remember when a test A380 lost a winglet in Bangkok earlier this year? Guess what Airbus, the company that also manufactured the Sri Lankan plane, had to say?

“This sort of thing happens every day, in every airport around the world,” said Edouard Ullmo, Airbus’ executive vice president of sales for Asia Pacific.

“We can fly with one winglet or no winglets,” said Ullmo. “This is standard procedure.”

So there. The irresponsible journalists at the Daily Mail (and those who brought the story over here to the US) then put out that picture circling the BA wingtip. That was just the BA plane, not the Sri Lankan plane. But you know what? All you have to do is take that winglet off the BA plane and it can fly as well. Here’s a picture of that BA plane in-flight without that winglet. If you believe the sources in this Airliners.net thread, the plane actually flew the next day as well. I don’t have official confirmation of that, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Now, I don’t know for sure what happened with the Sri Lankan aircraft. Is it possible that the plane was going to fly in an unsafe condition? I suppose so. But that was a very public incident involving the airplane, and I’d have to think that there were accident investigators swarming all over the place. I would be shocked if they let it fly in an unsafe condition.

Is this really the best fake-scary story they could come up with yesterday?