Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
Picture this: smooth cruise at 38,000 feet, cabin service underway, not a cloud in sight. Then, without a single pixel of weather on the radar, the aircraft lurches hard enough to send a drinks trolley into the ceiling. Clear-air turbulence. No warning. No visible threat. Just physics, doing what it does in invisible waves of…
Picture a wet Tuesday evening at a major hub. Visibility is borderline, cloud base is sitting uncomfortably low, and a queue of heavies is stacked up waiting to punch through. This is the environment where aviation’s oldest instrument landing technology earns its keep — and it’s also, quietly, where artificial intelligence is beginning to do…
Radar has been the backbone of air traffic control since the Second World War, and it is genuinely impressive technology. But it has a fundamental limitation that every controller knows and quietly works around: it tells you where an aircraft was, not quite where it is, and it tells you almost nothing about what the…