At Detroit Metropolitan Airport, police removed two passengers from a GoJet/Delta Connection flight because they apparently wouldn't turn off a mobile phone that reportedly had a WiFi network name of "Remote Detonator." From the Detroit Free Press:

...Flight attendants announced that they’d be calling police if personal WiFi wasn’t turned off, (passenger Aaron) Greenberg said.

It was a nerve-racking moment when an estimated 10 emergency vehicles with flashing lights surrounded the plane, he said...

A flight attendant told him there was a personal WiFi called “remote detonator” that was never turned off.

(Wayne County Airport Authority spokesperson Lisa) Gass could not confirm the name of the WiFi hot spot, but said both removed passengers – a 42-year-old woman and a 31-year-old man, both from Quebec – were released following the incident, pending further investigation.

image: Kai Hendry/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) Read the rest

A Roman Catholic church in the rural community of Cow Island, Louisiana dumped 100 gallons of holy water from a crop duster airplane onto the people and their land below. From NPR:

"I've blessed some buckets for people and such, but never that much water," (Rev. Matthew Barzare of St. Anne Church) said.

The pilot had instructions to drizzle certain parts of the community, including churches, schools, grocery stores and other community gathering places...

The idea was first proposed by a parishioner who is studying to become a missionary who was looking for a way to spread both community togetherness and holy water across Cow Island.

And the more Barzare considered it, the more it made sense.

"Most parishes have a central location, but my area that I have to cover is a good 30 minutes to the next church, and so by plane, we realized, it might be the easiest way to sprinkle people's fields, rather than me going in a car to different locations," he said.

Go full screen for this 4K video of an Airbus A380 landing at night at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. The YouTube channel, High Pressure Aviation Films, offers dozens of POV flight videos, from landings in Tahiti and Tokyo to the clip below of the Northern Lights seen from inside a Boeing 777 on its way from Los Angeles to Paris.

Read the rest

Above, a video posted by a passenger on a Philippine Airlines flight that headed out of LAX and then headed right back in again.

KTLA reports:

Passengers and people on the ground videotaped repeated blasts of flame coming from the right engine of the Boeing 777 minutes after takeoff.

“I could see, like, flashes of light. I thought it was ... just from the sunlight and then I just started hearing, like ‘boom, boom, boom,’” passenger Walter Baumann told KABC-TV. “And then I look out of the window and these balls of fire are just shooting out of the engine.”

Andrew Ames was a passenger in a car speeding down a freeway near the airport when he got a video of the plane.

“The back was spewing fire bolts,” he said. “It looked like when you see a backfire from a motorcycle. Then I thought, ‘I don’t think a plane is supposed to do that.’”

Film editor Andrew Saladino of the Royal Ocean Film Society analyzes the exquisitely engineered airships in the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Read the rest

Reason #256 for why I never leave the house without my Garmin InReach Mini: things always go wrong at the most inconvenient times. You know, like when you're mid-air in a small aircraft that decides it's finished flying for the day.

When Matt Lehtinen’s single-engine Cirrus crashed into the asshole end of Quebec's vast wilderness, he was packed and ready for the worst, with a satellite communications device, first aid kit and a few essential survival sundries. Having made it out of the hard landing that left his aircraft a write-off, he immediate fired off an SOS and started a fire. As if starting a survival fire and keeping an eye out for search and rescue personnel weren't enough to do, while he waited to be retrieved, Lehtinen also took the time to make a vlog of his ordeal. It's a great idea: if you get out in one piece, you've got a testament to the fact that staying calm and being properly equipped for an emergency situation can save your life. Alternatively, if he was eaten by a bear while waiting for a SAR flight to pop by, at least folks would know what happened to him. Read the rest

On January 26, 1972, a suspected bomb exploded on board a Yugoslav Airlines DC-9 and the debris of the plane rained down on mountains in the former Czechoslovakia. Everyone died except flight attendant Vesna Vulovic. After a long but full recovery, she returned to work for the airlines until she was fired in 1990 for protesting against President Slobodan Milošević's nationalism. Vulovic died in 2016. Watch her story above.

More in this BBC News obituary.

Read the rest

Again with the military and the sky penises. Last time I posted about this, it was Navy pilots pulling a prank over the state of Washington. This week, it was Air Force fighter jets over Arizona's Luke Air Force Base and the official statement is that it was an "accident." From CNN:

"We've seen the photos that have been circulating online from Tuesday afternoon. 56th Fighter Wing senior leadership reviewed the training tapes from the flight and confirmed that F-35s conducting standard fighter training maneuvers ... resulted in the creation of the contrails," an Air Force spokesperson told CNN. "There was no nefarious or inappropriate behavior during the training flight." Read the rest

On November 16, 2017, the crew of a Navy EA-18G Growler jet delighted sixth graders, launched a meme, and pissed off prudes everywhere by drawing a penis in the sky with their engine exhaust over the state of Washington. Their prank caused quite a stir in the Navy, even leading to an "official information dispatch" to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. It's still unknown how much trouble the pilots got themselves into but the Navy Times has just received a copy of the full report thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request. The cockpit transcripts are fantastic. From the Navy Times:

“You should totally try to draw a penis,” the (pilot's cockpit partner, an electronic warfare office [EWO]) advised.

“I could definitely draw one, that would be easy,” the pilot boasted. “I could basically draw a figure eight and turn around and come back. I’m gonna go down, grab some speed and hopefully get out of the contrail layer so they’re not connected to each other....”

“Balls are going to be a little lopsided,” the pilot advised.

“Balls are complete,” he reported moments later. “I just gotta navigate a little bit over here for the shaft.”

“Which way is the shaft going?” the EWO asked.

“The shaft will go to the left,” the pilot answered.

“It’s gonna be a wide shaft,” the EWO noted.

“I don’t wanna make it just like 3 balls,” the pilot said.

“Let’s do it,” the EWO said. “Oh, the head of that penis is going to be thick.”

For a decade, NASA scientists have worked on an air-to-air photographic technology that will be used to collect data for the agency's next-generation supersonic airplane project. They've just released these absolutely astonishing "first air-to-air images of supersonic shockwave interaction in flight."

“We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful," says NASA scientist J.T. Heineck.

From NASA:

The images feature a pair of T-38s from the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base, flying in formation at supersonic speeds. The T-38s are flying approximately 30 feet away from each other, with the trailing aircraft flying about 10 feet lower than the leading T-38. With exceptional clarity, the flow of the shock waves from both aircraft is seen, and for the first time, the interaction of the shocks can be seen in flight.

“We’re looking at a supersonic flow, which is why we’re getting these shockwaves,” said Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc. at NASA Ames’ fluid mechanics laboratory.

“What’s interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve,” he said. “This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact...”

While NASA has previously used the schlieren photography technique to study shockwaves, the AirBOS 4 flights featured an upgraded version of the previous airborne schlieren systems, allowing researchers to capture three times the amount of data in the same amount of time.

There is an abandoned McDonnell Douglas MD87 jetliner parked on the tarmac of Adolfo Suárez-Madrid Barajas airport in Spain. If this is your jetliner, the airport asks that you please move it immediately. Apparently, the plane has been illegally parked for some years. From CNN:

Airport director Elena Mayoral submitted an official notice to the Boletín Oficial del Estado, the official gazette of the Kingdom of Spain, informing the nation of a plane in an "obvious state of abandonment" at the airport...

Under Spanish law, authorities must publish official notices about the plane for three consecutive months and then wait a year to see if the owner comes forward to claim it.

If they do not, the plane will be considered legally abandoned and will be sold off by the state at a public auction.

From El País:

In 1990, the airplane flew for the first time for Iberia, according to online magazine Preferente.com. Eighteen years later it was acquired by Pronair, a charter airline headquartered in Albacete in Castilla-La Mancha. But the airline, which at one point was flying regularly to China, closed down in just a year due to the increase in fuel prices and the 2008 financial crisis.

Two years later, the plane was acquired by Saicus Air, a Spanish airline based in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. The airline operated two airplanes from Madrid and up until that point, had been dedicated to transporting cargo. The plane was meant to fly passengers between Spain and the Republic of Guinea Bissau in west Africa.

An EVA airlines flight attendant, supported by her union, complains the airline has failed to curb a routine problem flyer. Her recent experience sounds absolutely dreadful.

Folks need different types of assistance on a plane. I can absolutely understand the hardship of using an awful airplane restroom that is barely designed to work for the base human model. No one should feel shame for asking for legitimately needed assistance. The more you read this story, however, the more it seems that this passenger was not just asking for help.

Focus Taiwan:

Accompanied by representatives from the Taoyuan Flight Attendants Union, the flight attendant, who declined to give her name, said an overweight man confined to a wheelchair informed her he required assistance going to the bathroom about two hours into the flight.

The man asked the flight attendant making the complaint and two other female members of staff to help him remove his underwear, indicating he was unable to do so himself.

"I felt that as a flight attendant, removing a passenger's underwear was beyond the scope of my responsibilities," said the deputy cabin service head.

Despite their reluctance, three female members of the flight crew, EVA has no male flight attendants, tried to cover the passenger's genitals with a blanket while taking off his underwear.

The flight attendant said it was then that the passenger slapped her hand causing her to drop the blanket and exposing himself. He also demanded that the lavatory door be kept open, otherwise "he couldn't breathe."

Once a month, Delta Air Lines holds a "garage sale" at one of its facilities near their flight museum adjacent to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The New York Times' Jackie Snow visited this curious surplus sale. Turns out, many of the shoppers lining up to buy galley carts, oscilloscopes, earbuds, posters, branded silverware, and maybe even a scavenged coach class seat actually are Delta employees. From the NYT:

Perry De Vlugt, a Delta flight attendant based in Salt Lake City, has a basement full of Delta memorabilia; his collection was profiled in The Salt Lake Tribune, and he has a website dedicated to his hobby. He doesn’t know how many items he has, but he’s out of room in the 1,000-square-foot space dedicated to his collection...

Over the years, the sale has expanded to include decommissioned plane parts, service items and promotional material. Pieces as varied as pre-9/11 steak knives, coasters, an aircraft lavatory, old menus and timetables have been snapped up by collectors. The priciest item sold has been a $500 pressurized door from a DC-9 plane, and the sales contribute between $70,000 and $100,00 to the flight museum each year.

When Delta updates its branding, changes technology or over-orders or retires parts, those items are offered up to the sale.

“They suffer my wrath if they throw out anything before we get to take a look at it,” said Judy Bean, the sale’s manager and a Delta employee for 48 years.

"Stocking Up at an Airline’s Garage Sale" (New York Times)

Delta Surplus Sale (Delta Museum)

(Images: Delta Flight Museum posts on Facebook) Read the rest

The Irish Aviation Authority (IAA) is investigating multiple reports of UFOs over the coast of Ireland on Friday. From the BBC:

(A British Airways) pilot, flying from the Canadian city of Montreal to Heathrow, said there was a "very bright light" and the object had come up along the left side of the aircraft before it "rapidly veered to the north..."

(Another Virgin pilot said) there were "multiple objects following the same sort of trajectory" and that they were very bright.

The pilot said he saw "two bright lights" over to the right which climbed away at speed.

One pilot said the speed was "astronomical, it was like Mach 2" - which is twice the speed of sound.

According to the IAA, the matter will be "investigated under the normal confidential occurrence investigation process." Meanwhile, the BBC quotes an astronomer who suggests what the pilots saw could have been a meteoroid aka "shooting star."

Very interesting report on Shannon high level Friday 9 November at 0630z with multiple aircraft with reported sightings of a UFO over County Kerry. Skip to 17 minutes to listen reports on @liveatc https://t.co/VP1p0hrScn #Aviation #UFO #Ireland

— Trevor Buckley (@IrishAero) November 11, 2018

image: not the actual UFO over Ireland Read the rest

This gorgeous 1960s aerodynamic test model of a NASA supersonic transport plane from the space agency's Langley Research Center can be yours for $5,685. On offer from Agent Gallery Chicago, it's approximately 51" long with a wingspan of 24" and "built of wood and composite materials." Unfortunately, one of the fins has snapped off but I'm sure the right person could work wonders with a little balsa wood, X-acto knife, and paint.

"RARE 1960'S NASA AERODYNAMICS SST MODEL" (via Uncrate)

Read the rest

Police arrested Bruce Michael Alexander for groping a sleeping woman seated in front of him on a Southwest flight from Texas to New Mexico. In the police car, Alexander reportedly told police that "the president of the United States says it’s OK to grab women by their private parts." From USA Today:

The woman said she felt Alexander's hand move from behind her and grab her right breast. She said she fell asleep about 20 minutes into the flight and not long after, she felt him touch her but assumed it was an accident, according to court documents.

About 30 minutes later, she said she felt Alexander's hand grab the back of her arm and grope around her ribs and then her breast.

The woman then stood up and told Alexander she did not understand how he could think that was OK and he needed to stop.

There's no better way to beat the heat on your next beach vacation than to hold on for dear life while being blown around by the power of a jet engine. Read the rest