Life on 77 Squadron had settled down to a routine, if it ever really could on a fighter squadron. There was certainly plenty of variety to our flying. In one month I flew some practice bombing attacks, both day and night, on the Evans Head weapon’s range north by 230 nm. This was followed by a 4 ship formation demonstration of ground attack on our own airfield as part of an Open Day celebration for the public.  Then night radar bombing on the Beecroft range at Jarvis bay about 150 nm south. Then we bombed and sank a tug boat before flying off to New Zealand.

The Squadron hours board

A head on view of the FA18A

Our Hornets in close formation

A MK82 low drag general purpose bomb

A 77 Sqn Hornet landing

RNZAF Strikemasters AKA the Bluntie

The RNZAF A4 Skyhawk

Landing at Ohakea

My old buddy John

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Myself and Greenshed.

Marvin and Rebecca’s first two flights of the day were cancelled due to high winds at Newark so they both waited in the crew room until their company dispatch released them for flight 3407 at 6pm, 4 and a half hours after their initial report time.  Certainly for Rebecca, it had been a long time since she had done more than nap in a chair.  Their flight to Buffalo was due to take 53 minutes and they were carrying 45 passengers which, along with their two cabin attendants meant that they had 49 souls onboard their Q400 aircraft. The pilots’ performance was likely impaired because of fatigue but to what extent could not be conclusively determined.  However, they boiled down to the flight crew’s failure to monitor airspeed, the flight crew’s failure to adhere to sterile cockpit procedures, the Captain’s failure to effectively manage the flight and Colgan Air’s inadequate procedures for airspeed selection, management during approaches in icing conditions and training.  This is the story of Colgan Air Flight 3407.

A Bombardier Q400

The SAAB 340

The DH Dash 8

Examples of wing icing

Stills from the NTSB accident report

Stills from the NTSB accident report

Stills from the NTSB accident report

The wreckage of Flight 3407

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Lord of the Wings, Bill Abbott, Steve Fitzgerald, NASA and the NTSB.

With thanks to listener Sam Dawson who has such interesting relatives and to Betty Goerke, the author of a book about Baz Bagby, A Broken Propeller. I am pleased to present the story of Sam Dawson’s Great Uncle Baz.

Stunt pilot Lincoln Beachey at Niagara

The 1st Aero Squadron

Early Aerial Reconnaissance

The 88th Aero Squadron

General Billy Mitchell

The start of the Great Transcontinental Air Race

Great Uncle Baz

Images under creative commons licence with thanks to the Library of Congress, the USAAC, the USAF, the RFC, the US Army, the National Archives and SADSM.

The continuation of my log book tales, otherwise known as RAF Form 414, and we are up to Volume 20.  Apart from other asides, this tale deals with my accidental overflight of a very secret satellite surveillance base run by the Australians and the CIA!

Overflying Uluru (Ayres Rock)

My arrival at Alice Springs airport

My ‘circumnavigation’ of Australia

My aircraft being impounded on arrival at RAAF Pearce

Seeing my father at the 1881 Resturant

The Great Australian Bight

Passing through RAAF Edinburgh

Looking back through the fins

Heading home to Williamtown

Images under creative commons licence with thanks to Myself, Nachoman-au and Google Earth.

The DC-10 was McDonnell Douglas’s first commercial airliner project since the merger between McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. It started life on the drawing boards as a 4 engined, double decked, wide body airliner that could carry 550 passengers but morphed into single deck, three engined aircraft that could carry one passenger short of 400!  In what was expected to be a knockout blow to the competing Lockheed L-1011, the President of American Airlines and James McDonnell of McDonnell Douglas announced American Airlines’ intention to acquire the DC-10. Flight 96 was en route between Detroit and Buffalo when, above the city of Windsor in Ontario whilst climbing through 11,750 ft the flight crew heard a distinct thud and dirt and debris flew up from the cockpit floor into their faces. On inspection it was obvious that the rear cargo door had detached from the aircraft.  This is the story of the DC-10 cargo door issue and the engineer who tried to warn the company of the dire problem.

The 4 Engined Douglas Proposal

The DC-10

The Cargo Door

The Cargo Door of Flight 96

The Accident Report of Turkish Airlines Flight 981

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to the SDASM archives, the Douglas Aircraft Corp, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, the FAA and the DOT AIB.

Telling the tale of my flying career, I left you at the end of my F/A18 conversion course as we reformed the No 77 Royal Australian Air Force Squadron with their brand new Hornets. So far our one and only aircraft A21-5 was being shared around and everyone wanted a piece of it, either to fly or learn how to fix it.  The squadron execs were pretty busy dealing with the job of getting the new squadron personnel squared away so the rest of us got more than our share of flying.  There wasn’t much we could do with a single jet but I was happy just to play with a multi million dollar toy and get used to my new home.

The M61A Vulcan Cannon

The ‘Pig’ Australian F111

My route around Australia

Mt Isa

Arriving at Darwin

Uluru through the HUD

Pine Gap

Alice Springs

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Peter Gronemann, General Dynamics, Fhrx, and Google Maps.

Hawaii became the most recent state to join the union in 1959 and is now the third wealthiest.  Following it’s annexation, Hawaii became an important naval base for the US Navy so it is hardly surprising that they should be the first to attempt a flight from the US mainland to the island.  Aviation had already arrived at the islands in 1910 courtesy of Bud Mars, the Curtiss Daredevil.

The Hawaiian Archipelago

The annexation of Hawaii

J C Mars

Commander John Rodgers

Rodgers in the Wright Flyer

The PN9 flying boat

Rodgers and his crew survive to be welcomed into Hawaii

The Atlantic-Fokker C-2 Tri-motor

Atlantic-Fokker C-2 “Bird of Paradise” arrival in Hawaii

The start of the Dole Air Race

In all, six aircraft were lost or damaged beyond repair and ten lives lost.

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Google Map Images, Bain News Service, Harris and Ewing, the Library of Congress, Hawaii Aviation, the USAF and the SDASM.

Images under Creatiove Commons licence with thanks to

It was the 13th of May 1912, a Monday, when a Flanders F3 Monoplane took off from Brooklands in Surrey, a county of England.  The pilot was the aviation pioneer Edward Victor Beauchamp Fisher and his passenger the American millionaire Victor Mason.  Fisher had an Aviator’s Certificate, the 77th to be issued, had learned to fly at Brooklands and was a flying instructor there.  He had also worked with both A V Roe (the founder of Avro) and Howard Flanders, whose monoplane he was flying at the time.  The two men had made two or three circuits of the airfield at about 100ft, the 60 hp Green engine operating well when, in a left turn, the aircraft fell to the ground killing both the aviator and his passenger before catching alight and burning.  In the early days of aviation such accidents were fairly common but what sets this one apart is that it was the first in history to become the subject of an accident investigation by an official civilian body… the Public Safety and Accidents Investigation Committee of the Royal Aero Club.

Brooklands airfield and motor racing circuit circa 1907

The Flanders F3/4

The Wright crash

Lt Frank Lahm

The 1920 Air Navigation Act

The 1926 formation of the NTSB

NTSB Investigators

The Challenger disaster

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Daimler Chrysler AG, Bain News Service, National Museum of Health and Medicine, the USAF, UK Gov, NTSB and the Kennedy Space Centre.

The 12 days of Christmas are generally thought to run from the 26th of December to the 6th of January and is an important period of religious celebration or for those of us who observe Christmas in a more secular manner, it’s more likely to be a traditional time of recovery following our holiday excesses and to welcome in the New Year. Of course, those of us in the Aviation industry often remember dates by events that occurred on a particular day and the most memorable are often the most tragic.  With that in mind I present the 12 crashes of Christmas.

The TU144

Earthrise from Apollo 8

The Lockheed A-12 Oxcart

The C-130

The Avro Ten

The Vickers Wellington

The Handley Page O

The captured bomber

Gustav Hamel and Eleanor Trehawke Davies

Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man

The Flying Machine

The Convair 440 Metropolitan airliner

Amelia Mary Earhart

Earhart’s Electra

Amy Johnson

A Finnish Fokker

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to Michel Gilliand, NASA, the USAF, State Library of Queensland, the RAF, US National Archives, the Rijksmuseum, Luc Viatour, SDASM,and those images within the Public Domain.

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was one of two men who left the earth’s surface and flew in Montgolfier’s balloon for the very first time. He also designed a type of balloon that was given his name that flew using a combination of a lifting gas and hot air. More than 200 years later, his design would be used in the balloon that made the first non stop round the world flight.

A Rozièr balloon

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier in a Montgolfier balloon

De Rozièr perishes in a baloon crash over Wimereux

Don Cameron led the way in record breaking and unusual balloon design

Double Eagle II

Virgin Flyer

The successful balloon circumnavigation by Piccard and Jones

Images under Creative Commons licence with thanks to those Public Domain images available, NASA, the Smithsonian,The Virgin Group, Cameron balloons and Breitling.