Free Republic

Britain could reach its highest levels of UV radiation due to a lack of planes, coupled with clear blue skies and sweltering temperatures — a potent combination that increases the risk of skin cancer. Ultraviolet rays, which can also cause sunburn and cataracts, are expected to reach level 9 across parts of Devon and Cornwall on what is set to be the hottest day of the year in the UK so far. The mercury hit a sweltering 90.5°F (32.5°C) on Wednesday, while temperatures today could climb even further in the Midlands and Wales. West London is forecast to see temperatures...

In the years after World War I, when aviation was all the rage in Europe and North America but the Treaty of Versailles banned the production of military aircraft in Germany, glider clubs sprang up across the country. The brothers Walter and Reimar Horten, just 13 and 10 years old, respectively, joined the Bonn glider club in 1925, and soon turned from flying kites to a far more ambitious activity—experimenting on a futuristic, tail-less aircraft known as a flying wing. The idea was not unprecedented; the German aerospace engineer Hugo Junkers had patented a flying-wing design in 1910. The concept...

Eco-protestors at Heathrow Airport who sought to bring flight chaos to thousands this morning have been prevented from flying drones into the airport's restricted airspace by jamming technology. Meanwhile three protestors, including a former Irish Paralympian banned for a doping violation, have been arrested at the airport following six arrests of Extinction Rebellion leaders yesterday. No flights are believed to have been affected and the protestors posted a humiliating video at 3am showing them trying and failing to get their flying toy airborne.

An American Airlines mechanic was arrested Thursday on a sabotage charge accusing him of disabling a navigation system on a flight with 150 people aboard before it was scheduled to take off from Miami International Airport earlier this summer. The reason, according to a criminal complaint affidavit filed in Miami federal court: Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, a veteran employee, was upset over stalled union contract negotiations. None of the passengers and crew on the flight to Nassau were injured because the tampering with the so-called air data module caused an error alert as the pilots powered up the plane’s engines...

An American Airlines mechanic was arrested Thursday on a sabotage charge accusing him of disabling a navigation system on a flight with 150 people aboard before it was scheduled to take off from Miami International Airport earlier this summer. The reason, according to a criminal complaint affidavit filed in Miami federal court: Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani, a veteran employee, was upset over stalled union contract negotiations. Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article234766107.html#storylink=cpy

In recent years, Hezbollah has stepped up its activities beyond Lebanon’s borders. This uptick has been clearest in the Middle East—in Iraq, Yemen, and especially Syria—but plots have also been thwarted in South America, Asia, Europe, and now, possibly, the United States. Reports of Hezbollah activity in North America are not new, though such reporting tends to focus on the group’s fundraising, money laundering, procurement, or other logistical activities from Vancouver to Miami. But last month, the criminal prosecution and conviction in New York of the Hezbollah operative Ali Kourani revealed disturbing new information about the extent of Hezbollah’s operations...

**SNIP** In my 23 years as a flight attendant and president of our union representing 50,000 others, I know firsthand the threat climate change poses to our safety and our jobs. But flight attendants and airline workers have been told by some pundits that the Green New Deal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s environmental proposal, will ground all air travel. That’s absurd. It’s not the solutions to climate change that kills jobs. Climate change itself is the job killer. Severe turbulence is becoming more frequent and intense due in part to climate change. Research indicates that rising CO2...

Sen. Mike Lee didn’t quite bring a snowball onto the Senate floor. But the Utah Republican’s prop-filled speech Tuesday mocking the proposed Green New Deal resolution on addressing climate change elicited similar incredulous reactions from Democrats. Lee’s speech — in which the conservative Mormon argued, seemingly genuinely, that the “real solution to climate change” was to have more children — included a dramatic portrait of former President Ronald Reagan firing a machine gun while on the back of a velociraptor, photos of Star Wars characters and Aquaman, and frames from the sci-fi disaster movie “Sharknado.”

The first fully assembled Boeing 777X - the world's longest passenger jetliner - has been unveiled. The aircraft had expected to be presented with much fanfare in a ceremonial debut at the plane manufacturer's plant in Everett, near Seattle, on Wednesday. But as a mark of respect for those who died in the Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max 8 crash, it was instead unveiled in a low-key event that was only attended by Boeing employees.

The United States will no longer fly the Boeing 737 Max 8 and Max 9 after an Ethiopian Airlines flight crashed Sunday shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board. President Trump said he was grounding them flights from both models - 'effective immediately' - on Wednesday afternoon. Any plane that is currently in the air will be allowed to land and then they will be grounded until further notice, he said. Trump said he made the decision after following a with Elaine Chao, the transportation secretary, after new information emerged on the tragic crash.

I am Gerald Eastman, The Last (Boeing) Inspector. You can find more about me here and throughout this site. I have been fighting the Boeing/FAA fraud noted above since January 11th, 2002, when I was explicitly faced with the fact that this fraud was put in place and directed by Boeing Management by my QA supervisor of the time. My QA supervisor was just the most honest of several corrupt Boeing QA supervisors I had had at that point. QA supervisors at Boeing were the same as similarly corrupt Boeing Manufacturing Management. Both focused on achieving cost and schedule goals...

Southwest Airlines, the nation's third-largest carrier, is struggling with a surge in planes being taken out of service for maintenance. The airline blames the mechanics union, but the union claims it's a matter of safety. Photos obtained exclusively by CBS News show what mechanics describe as landing gear tires so worn that Southwest had to pull a 737 out of service on Tuesday. More than 40 airplanes per day have been grounded for maintenance issues since last Tuesday. That's unusually high, more than double a normal day. Southwest has declared an "operational emergency" and its chief operating officer Mike Van...

On 31 December 2018, our XP-82 Twin Mustang flew for the first time since 14 December 1949. Although it wasn’t supposed to fly yesterday, all that was planned to do was the last FAA required runway high-speed taxi test, lift off for a second or two and then back down, deploy full flaps and brake to a stop. It accelerated so fast after the planned lift off that Ray, our test pilot, realized that getting it back down and stopping it in the remaining runway would be marginal. So he pushed the power back up and flew for about five...

Somehow I wasn’t familiar with the story of Aeroflot flight 6502 from Yekaterinburg to Kuibyshev to Grozny. On October 20, 1986 the pilot of the Tupolev Tu-134A bet his co-pilot that he could land the plane blind. He would draw the curtains on the cockpit windows and make an instrument-only approach. One of the many bizarre things about this incident is, why would the co-pilot accept a bet in which if he wins he likely dies? There’s only the narrowest window in which he might win the bet and actually collect. On approach to Grozny the pilot ignored the ground...

China has taken its love for giant pandas to new heights. An airline company has launched a daily flight inspired by the black-and-white animals, which is considered by the nation to be its national treasure. Passengers on the so-called 'Panda Route' are transported by an Airbus A350 sporting cartoon livery of eight pandas, greeted by air hostesses donning panda-inspired uniforms and treated with food resembling the image of the lovely bears.

It’s not available in the U.S. but a South Korean company is so proud of the country’s first indigenous light sport aircraft, it brought it to AirVenture just to show it off. The Vessel Aircraft KLA-100 was certified by South Korea in 2017 and also has EASA certification. FAA acceptance under the LSA category is expected next. The aircraft began development in 2013 and went into production earlier this year. The company is government owned. The aircraft has a large 51-inch-wide cockpit with a Garmin 3X Touch panel on two 10.6-inch touchscreens. It has a two-axis autopilot and analog backup...

For white-knuckle flyers like me, this week's tragic accident aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from New York to Texas reinforces our worst fears but also reassures us that flying remains the safest means of travel within the United States. I fly 100,000 miles a year, despite my phobias, and have encountered everything but an actual crash or loss of life aboard the many flights I've taken -- last-minute aborted landings, engine failure, lightning strikes, fires in the galley, loss of the hydraulic system, geese sucked into the engine during takeoff. Some of these incidents required emergency landings with runways foamed...

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Many were horrified on Tuesday upon learning an Albuquerque woman was killed after being partially pulled out of a plane when a nearby window was smashed by debris from an exploding engine. “Two words: extremely rare,” said Alan Diehl, a former air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration and U.S. Air Force, of incidents involving passengers being pulled from planes in flight. But on Nov. 3, 1973, a similar scenario unfolded on a flight over southwest New Mexico heading from Houston to Las Vegas, Nev. Then, a Texas man died after he...

Greetings and Salutations to everyone on this fine Valentine's day and I hope this stupid little Vanity I spit out finds it's way to your eyeballs. I'm moving my family across the country, but I'm not sure where yet. Luckily, this thread isn't about that. What it is about is my simmering desire to take to the air. When I move across the country, I really want to se my next goal to be a private airplane owner. But I know nothing on the topic. I mean I read a lot on it, but I'm itching to talk to someone...

Boeing delivered a record number of commercial airplanes last year, the company reported Tuesday, firing up a rally in the company's stock. The aerospace giant delivered 763 planes, one more than its previous high set in 2015. The company's stock rallied after the report, closing up 2.7 percent at $318.43 and leading the Dow industrials higher. Boeing, whose shares have more than doubled over the last 12 months, said it booked orders for 912 commercial airplanes, the seventh highest annual total for the company.