Fear of Landing

The Art of Not Hitting the Ground Too Hard

  1. Fuel Switches in the Cutoff Position on China Eastern flight 5735

    On the 21st of March 2022, a Boeing 737 passenger airliner crashed into a mountain. This was China Eastern Airlines flight 5735 flying from Kunming to Guangzhou in the People’s Republic of China. All 132 souls on board perished in the crash. This was the first fatal crash of a Chinese mainline carrier in nearly twelve years.…

  2. Outtakes from the Air Show

    I’m still on the road and using the quiet hours to work through my photographs from the air show. Aviation photography sure does have a way of revealing one’s limitations! The aircraft fly faster than I expect. The framing is just a few feet off. Someone stands up in excitement and photobombs the shot. Another…

  3. Ferry Tank Failure: Successful SR22 Ditching in the Pacific

    In 2015, I shared a video of an SR22 whose pilot successfully deployed his Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS) off of the coast of Maui, Hawai’i. I wrote at the time that I would update once the final report came out. I am rather behind on my todo list, I’m afraid. The Cirrus SR22 is at…

  4. Meowing on Guard (an attempt at an explanation)

    Last week a video went viral and it’s been fun to see the mainstream media coverage try to cover two pilots who were heard making animal noises on the radio.  There’s a lot of contextual knowledge and lore to understand what happened here, so although the actual event really isn’t worth a news headline, it is…

  5. I wanted to post this from 30,000 feet

    I’m in transit this week, somewhere between time zones, airport coffee, and the unsettling suspicion that I’ve forgotten something important. The article about a double-engine failure that I planned to finish in advance kept getting more complicated. At the point where I thought “maybe this is a three-part article”, I realised that I wasn’t going…