Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
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…
In the summer of 1941, a team of RAF aircrew climbed into a Consolidated B-24 Liberator at Gander, Newfoundland, and pointed its nose east toward Britain. The flight took roughly ten hours. Nobody wrote songs about it. There was no ticker-tape parade. But what those crews were doing — quietly, repeatedly, in stripped-out military transports…
Picture the scene at any major airline’s operations centre at two in the morning. A dispatcher is staring at a wall of weather data, fuel loads, NOTAM stacks, and route options for a long-haul departure in six hours. There are dozens of variables in play — jet stream position, alternate airport weather, payload, step-climb possibilities,…