Great Circle Mapper
I came across the great circle mapper website that allows you to plot on a map routes you have taken from airports. I tossed in all the flights (that I can remember) since 2000. Total distance traveled: 67654 km
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Places On The Web
I spent this rainy day bumming around the net. I found some interesting aviation related websites. Please feel free to comment and let me know what your fav is. Love Is In The Air. This is a dating site for “airline crew”. I took a quick look around and stopped when I saw “flight69’s” profile…
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Flying and Cellphones: Mythbuster Style
The latest episode of Mythbusters tackles the myth of cell phones on airplanes. Their experiment was done two different ways. First they purchased a bunch of equipment, radio stacks, VOR/NDB radios, GPSs and got it working. They then tested the equipment by tuning it to an airport VOR (San Francisco, which was 10miles away). During…
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CRM in the 50’s
Crew Resource Management. It’s a concept that is relatively new to the aviation scene. The idea behind CRM is that work flows and communication in the cockpit and with the rest of the crew is optimized. A lot of aviation accidents in the past were due to a lack of CRM. The most famous would…
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Busted!
This is a repost from Aviatrix’s latest post. First, some background: ADF Is a navigation tool thats based on AM radio signals. The way it works is that there are a bunch of “stations” (called NDBs, Non Directional Beacons) all over Canada that broadcast this AM signal that you use for direction finding. There is…
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In Russia Airplane Flys You!
This clip is a good example of a language barrier that could cause potential problems with air traffic. It looks like the controller was telling the pilot that the flight level was available until a certain point, however both the pilot (and my self) didn’t understand. Listen to the clip here. Also interesting to note:…
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Slow Flight
I’m sure you’ve heard the news. Steve Fossett is trying to break the longest flight record in his Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer. I’d be interesting to see if anyone is able to capture some clips of his travels on LiveATC.net. His route takes him over Canadian airspace (specifically Gander, NL) which LiveATC.net has a feed…
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Your Textbook is Wrong!
… according to one of my teachers. Let’s start off with a little bit of grade 10 physics: There are four forces that act on an airplane: Lift, Weight (gravity), Thrust, and Drag. All of these forces are equal in straight and level flight. Rule of Flight #1: Lift always acts perpendicular to the wingspan…
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Plane + House = Bad
I happen to come across an image of an aircraft that smashed into a house. I decided to look up its registry and discovered that it took off from Buttonville! The accident report is availble on the TSBs website. Good news is that nobody was seriously hurt.
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NOTAMs and the AFTN
Since my flight was canceled today because of the weather, I figured it would be a good time to talk about NOTAMs. A NOTAM is a NOTice to AirMen and it lets pilots and controllers know of things that are different or out of the ordinary. Lets take a look at some of the currently…
