aviation

If you’ve got 104 spare minutes, I can’t recommend this highly enough. Eric “Winkle” Brown, legendary test pilot, gives a lecture to the Yeovilton branch of the RAeS. There are encounters with Winston Churchill, Frank Whittle, Wernher von Braun, Hermann Göring, Hanna Reitsch, and Heinrich Himmler. There are aircraft as wonderful as the Spitfire IX,…

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I recently read William Langewiesche’s Aloft (Penguin Modern Classics), his collected essays on flight. One of these, justly regarded as a classic, deals with the loss of Valujet 592 near Miami in 1996, an accident which bears a strong resemblance, in his telling, to the parallel experience of rail privatisation in the UK. Deregulation permitted…

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The Airports Commission is eventually going to opt for Gatwick. Prediction. How did I come to this conclusion? And how representative is the commission as an institution? Well, we can understand the decision-making process here with a simple model. There are various actors involved, who have preferences. To illuminate this, let’s play a game of…

Read More Boris Island: Shag, Marry, Avoid?

Good NYT piece is good – working through the effort to arm Syrian rebels, with Saudi and Qatari money, Croatian surplus warstocks, and Jordanian airlift. Inevitably, the kit is moving aboard Il-76s. This time out, though, the aircraft are Jordanian (and occasionally other) military aircraft that sometimes operate as “Jordan International Air Cargo”, a nationalised…

Read More Don’t read this, read them!