Pilot Nick - 10 min read

Somewhere in your family group chat, this is probably happening already. Someone finds a flight that gets everyone there in time, the rest of the family books the same one, and the 7:05 on Thanksgiving morning sits there half empty for a lot less money.

I’d take the 7:05. I’d take Christmas morning over the 23rd, and I’d fly home on New Year’s Day before I’d go anywhere near the Sunday after. I’ve spent 28 years and more than 12,000 hours up front, a fair share of them on holidays, and the days most people avoid are some of the easiest flying of the year. This is the holiday follow-up to The Flight Times Everyone Hates and Why Pilots Secretly Love Them, and the reasoning is much the same: a quiet day is quiet for the airplane and the crew as well as for you.

Thanksgiving is 31 days away, so there’s still time to use this.

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Everyone flies on the same handful of days

The busiest day ever recorded at US airport checkpoints was the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year. The TSA screened 3,133,924 people on November 30, 2025, nearly all of them trying to get home before work on Monday.

Christmas followed the same pattern. On Sunday, December 28, 2025, nearly 2.92 million people went through security. Three days earlier, on Christmas Day, it was about 2.07 million, so roughly 850,000 fewer people at the airports.

New Year’s Eve is close behind. In TSA data from 2021 through 2025, it’s the quietest day of the season that isn’t a holiday itself, quieter on average than Christmas Eve.

The fares follow the crowds. Going, the flight-deal site, looked at 2025 holiday prices and found that flying on the holiday itself saved about 15 to 30 percent. Thanksgiving Day was the cheapest day to fly out of three of the five US regions it studied, and Christmas Day was the cheapest out of the Midwest and the Northeast.

If you’re a nervous flyer, a packed Sunday is every bit as safe as a quiet Christmas morning. The rules and the safety margins are the same whatever the crowd. What changes is your chance of leaving on time and arriving the same day, and that’s where the quiet days win.

What a quiet day looks like from up front

From the gate, a holiday morning means a short security line and plenty of empty seats. From the cockpit I’m looking at different things: how much room there is in the sky, how long the line is at the de-icing pad, and whether the crew has been chasing delays since dawn.

Start with the sky. When weather cuts the number of airplanes a big airport can land in an hour, the FAA holds flights on the ground at their departure airports. It calls these ground delay programs, or ground stops when it halts departures altogether. Your airplane is fine and your crew is ready, and you sit at the gate anyway because Newark can only take so many arrivals in a snow shower at 5 PM. On a holiday, with fewer flights on the schedule, the same weather backs up fewer airplanes, so those programs are rarer and shorter. Your phone’s forecast won’t show you any of this, which is why I wrote Your Weather App Is Lying to You About Your Flight.

Then there’s the de-icing pad, which matters from late November on and is the part of winter flying I’d most like passengers to understand. When snow or freezing drizzle is falling, the airplane usually gets two sprays. The first is hot fluid, usually orange-tinted, that cleans the snow and ice off. The second is thicker, usually green, and it coats the wings so new snow melts into it instead of sticking to the metal. That coat only works for so long. We call the limit the holdover time, and it depends on the temperature, the type of precipitation and how hard it’s coming down. In steady snow it can be well under half an hour, counted from the moment the green coat goes on.

If we’re still waiting in line for the runway when that time runs out, we normally go back, get sprayed again and rejoin the line. On a peak day, with a long queue between the pad and the runway, that loop is how a 20-minute delay becomes two hours. On Christmas morning we get sprayed, taxi almost straight to the runway, and take off with the fluid still doing its job.

If you’re watching from a window seat, the green on the wing is that protective coat. Orange on its own is normal too, because on a cold, dry morning with nothing falling, cleaning is all the airplane needs. The faint sweet smell that sometimes reaches the cabin is the fluid. It isn’t harmful at those levels, and we usually shut off the outside air while the truck is spraying to keep most of it out. I wrote up the whole de-icing story in April, if you want more: Why Your Plane Is Getting Hosed Down With Green Liquid.

Last, the crew. Every pilot and flight attendant has a legal limit on how long they can be on duty. On a peak day, small delays get passed from one flight to the next, and by evening some crews run into that limit. When a crew times out, the flight can’t leave with them, and if the airline can’t find a fresh crew, it cancels. Airlines keep reserve crews and a few spare airplanes for exactly this, but on the busiest days they’re stretched thin by evening. On the holiday itself there’s usually more slack, and a small problem gets solved with a phone call.

Who works a holiday comes down to seniority. Some senior crew bid those trips for the holiday pay many contracts offer, and plenty of junior crew are there because they couldn’t hold the day off. Some of them would rather be home for dinner, but on a quiet holiday no one on the crew is running behind, and you can feel that in the cabin. Many pilots’ families fly standby too, and on a holiday morning there’s often a seat for them, which is one more reason pilots like these days.

The three days I’d book

On Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 26, I’d take the first departure of the day, ideally before 8 AM, and I’d pay a little more for a nonstop, because on a holiday morning the connection is the likeliest thing to go wrong. That first airplane spent the night at your airport, the crew starts fresh, and there’s no earlier flight that can make it late. Most short and mid-length trips put you down before noon, well ahead of the turkey. On a frosty morning the whole first wave needs the frost sprayed off, so there can be a wait on the pad, but with nothing falling the cleaning fluid is usually enough and there’s no short holdover clock running. Book your ride to the airport the night before, too. Buses run holiday schedules, and rideshares can be thin before 6 AM.

Christmas Day, Friday, December 25, is one of the quietest days of the season at the airports, and last year it was the cheapest day to fly out of the Midwest and the Northeast. Morning flights get you there for lunch, and evening flights are often lighter still. Look at the seat map before you pay for extra space, because your odds of an empty seat next to you are usually better than on the busy days around it. If you’re choosing a seat anyway, this is how I pick mine.

New Year’s Eve, Thursday, December 31, is the quietest ordinary day of the season. Fly during the day, land by early evening, and you’ll still have time to change for the party. Coming home, New Year’s Day is usually much lighter than Sunday, January 3, when most of the country heads back to work, and Saturday the 2nd is usually somewhat lighter.

Five more hints for the next two months

1. If you missed the fare sweet spot, look at the quiet days. Last October I wrote that Google Flights data puts the best Thanksgiving fares about 35 days out (the 35-day rule). This year that was last Thursday, October 22. Fares on the busy days usually climb from here, but last year Thanksgiving Day itself was the cheapest day to fly out of three of five US regions, so set a fare alert for Thursday morning before you give up on the trip.

2. Keep an eye on December 11 when you book Christmas. Congress has funded the government until then, two weeks before Christmas. If the money runs out, air traffic controllers keep working, unpaid. Last year the FAA’s flight cuts at 40 airports only came more than five weeks into the shutdown, as staffing thinned, to protect the safety margins, and I explained at the time in The Shutdown Didn’t Make Flying Dangerous. Nobody knows yet whether Congress will extend that date, so for Christmas I’d buy a fare I can change without a fee. On the big US airlines that usually means anything above basic economy, and you’d pay only the fare difference.

3. Read the fare rules before you buy. The cheapest holiday fares are often basic economy, with no seat choice and, on some airlines, no full-size carry-on. Families should check the airline’s family-seating policy first, because several US airlines now seat young kids next to a parent for free even on basic fares (the age cutoff varies). The next fare up is still often worth it for the carry-on alone. A checked bag that misses a connection on a peak day can take days to find you.

4. Install the airline’s app before you leave home. When a flight cancels, it usually offers you a new seat before the gate agent can get to you. And if the airline cancels your flight or delays it three hours or more on a domestic trip (six on an international one), and you’d rather not travel at all, US rules now give you a cash refund instead of a voucher, as long as you don’t accept the rebooking or the voucher first.

5. Leave the presents unwrapped. The TSA may need to open a wrapped gift, so use gift bags or ship them ahead. Wine and snow globes bigger than a tennis ball go in a checked bag. The pie can come in your carry-on, though gravy and cranberry sauce over 3.4 ounces can’t.

If someone in your family is still booking, send them those five.

Most people guess my no-fly day is the Sunday after Thanksgiving, since it holds the record and it’s a hard day, but it isn’t my answer.

There’s one window, a few hours long, that I won’t book for my own family at any fare. People choose it because it feels sensible, and from the cockpit it’s when everything I’ve described goes wrong at once.

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The one holiday window I’d never fly 👇🏻

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Pilot Nick - 2mn read

Over the past week, Houthi missiles and drones have hit several Saudi airports. Riyadh’s King Khalid International took the worst of it. At least 19 people have died, among them a Saudia captain and a flynas flight attendant who were simply at work, doing the job my colleagues and I do every day. My thoughts are with their families and their crews.

Here’s where things stand today

• Riyadh is closed until at least the end of Saturday, October 17, and that date can move. Jeddah, Dammam and Madinah are open but running heavy delays and cancellations. Dubai and Doha are open and operating. European regulators have told airlines to avoid parts of Saudi airspace and use caution over the rest.

• The FAA has also issued a caution notice for American airlines flying over Saudi Arabia, in force until December 10.

• If you’re flying between Europe and Asia, this matters even if you never land in the region. Since March, a large share of those flights have crossed Saudi Arabia, and its airports sit on the captain’s list of places we could divert to if we needed to land quickly. With Riyadh shut and warnings in place, airline planners are routing around the risk. Some flights take longer tracks, some go north through Central Asia, and some add a fuel stop. If your flight is scheduled longer than it was last month, that’s usually why, and that extra time is margin they’ve chosen to pay for.

• If you’re booked through the region before October 20, check with your airline now and avoid tight connections at the far end.

I’ve updated my full Middle East airspace guide with where every hub stands, the backup hubs I’d use now, and what I’d do if you’re booked this week.

Read the updated guide here

If someone you know is flying that way this month and has been watching the news with a knot in their stomach, please forward this to them.

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Fly Safe,
Pilot Nick

Pilot Nick - 4 min read

Most passenger jets cruise between 31,000 and 42,000 feet, which is roughly 6 to 8 miles (about 9.5 to 12.8 km) above the ground. On a typical flight you spend most of the trip somewhere around 35,000 feet.

Typical cruising altitude by type of aircraft

• Small piston planes (a Cessna, for example): 3,000 to 10,000 feet

• Regional turboprops (ATR 72, Dash 8): up to about 25,000 feet

• Short and medium-haul jets (Airbus A320, Boeing 737): 31,000 to 39,000 feet, with a ceiling around 41,000

• Long-haul jets (Boeing 787, Airbus A350, Boeing 777): 33,000 to 43,000 feet

• Large business jets (Gulfstream G600): 41,000 to 51,000 feet

• Concorde, retired in 2003: up to 60,000 feet

When I flew the MD-80 as a first officer, our cruise levels sat in the low to mid 30s, and the airplane couldn’t go above 37,000 feet anyway. Today I fly a Gulfstream, which is certified to 51,000 feet, and we usually cruise in the 40s, above most of the airline traffic.

Why do planes fly so high?

Thin air saves fuel

At 35,000 feet the air is roughly a third as dense as it is at sea level. Less air pushing against the airplane means less drag, so every kilo of fuel takes you further. Jet engines also run more efficiently in cold air, and it’s around minus 55°C up there. This is the main reason, and it’s why pilots and dispatchers spend real time choosing the right cruise level for each flight.

Most of the weather is below you

Nearly all clouds, rain and bumpy air live in the lowest layer of the atmosphere. At cruise we’re above most of it, which is why the middle of a flight is usually the smoothest part. The exception is big thunderstorms, which can tower past 40,000 feet. We don’t try to climb over those. We see them on the weather radar and fly around them, normally giving them 20 miles or more.

Altitude buys time

Pilots think of height as a safety margin you can spend. A jet at 35,000 feet with no engine power (an extremely rare situation) can glide for something like 100 miles. That is a lot of time to work a problem, restart an engine, or pick an airport. In 2001, an Air Transat Airbus A330 ran out of fuel over the Atlantic and glided about 75 miles to a landing in the Azores. Everyone on board survived. Here is my article about this incident 👇🏻

And if one engine fails, the airplane keeps flying on the other. It simply descends to a lower altitude where the remaining engine can hold it level.

The sky is organized in layers

Up at cruise there’s less traffic, and it’s stacked neatly. In most of the world, flights heading roughly east use odd levels (33,000, 35,000, 37,000 feet) and flights heading west use even ones (34,000, 36,000, 38,000). Air traffic control keeps a minimum of 1,000 feet between airplanes vertically, and the onboard collision avoidance system watches that independently.

Why don’t planes fly even higher?

The same thin air that saves fuel also gives the wings less to work with and the engines less to breathe. The higher you go, the closer the slowest safe speed and the fastest allowed speed get to each other. Pilots call that narrow band “coffin corner,” which sounds dramatic but is just the edge of the airplane’s envelope. The flight management computer works out our maximum altitude for the day’s weight, and we stay comfortably below it. Read about it below:

Weight matters a lot. A long-haul jet full of fuel can’t climb as high at the start of the flight, so we often “step climb” a few thousand feet at a time as the fuel burns off and the airplane gets lighter.

Short flights cruise lower. On a 45-minute hop there’s no time to climb to 39,000 feet and still come down gently, so the airplane might top out in the 20s.

The cabin also sets a limit. The airplane is pressurized so that inside it feels like 6,000 to 8,000 feet (about the altitude of a mountain ski resort), even when you’re at 38,000 outside. Flying higher means a bigger pressure difference for the fuselage to hold, and every airliner is built and certified for a specific maximum.

What it means for you in your seat

The cabin altitude explains a few things you’ve probably noticed: your ears pop on the way up and down, a sealed bag of chips puffs up, and your water bottle crinkles as you descend.

It also explains a sound that worries a lot of passengers. When we reach cruising altitude, the engines get noticeably quieter. That’s the power coming back from climb setting to cruise setting. Nothing has gone wrong; the airplane has simply arrived where it was designed to spend most of its life.

FAQ:

How high do planes fly in miles? About 6 to 8 miles.

How high do planes fly in meters? Around 9,500 to 12,800 meters.

How high do private jets fly? Large business jets typically cruise between 41,000 and 51,000 feet.

What’s the highest a commercial airliner can fly? Most airliners are certified to between 39,000 and 43,100 feet.

Why does the captain announce “we’ve reached our cruising altitude”? Because the busiest phase of the flight for us (the climb) is over, and the seatbelt sign often comes off soon after.

If someone you travel with grips the armrest when the engines go quiet after takeoff, send them this page.

Want to know what turbulence really is, and whether those forecast apps are telling you the whole story? I wrote about that here:

I write every week about what happens on the other side of the cockpit door. Subscribe free and the next one lands in your inbox.

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Fly Safe, Pilot Nick

Black Box Series · Pilot Nick 10mn read — Updated October 7, 2026

In 28 years of flying, the person in the other seat has been my first safety system, and I’ve been theirs.

We brief together. We check each other’s numbers. We speak up when something looks wrong. We trust each other with our lives, often before we know much about each other outside the cockpit.

“That is why flydubai flight FZ1073 is hard for pilots to read.”

On September 30, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv went through a violent descent before diverting to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Everyone on board survived.

On October 3, the UAE’s Attorney-General said the co-pilot had attacked the captain with a crash axe and attempted to take control of the aircraft. Investigations into the circumstances, motives and possible links remain ongoing.

The captain says he managed to unlock the cockpit door while under attack. That allowed help to reach the flight deck. Flydubai says crew members travelling on board secured the aircraft, diverted it and landed safely.

You’ve probably seen the other headlines too: the passenger who says he helped pull the airplane out of the dive, the suggestion that both engines were shut down, the photographs of the damaged rudder.

Some of those accounts may prove accurate. Some still need evidence.

What I can offer is a pilot’s reading of the information available: what the flight path tells us, what those emergency codes mean, why a passenger video cannot settle the engine question, and what it takes to walk from a passenger seat into a cockpit in crisis.

Why the cockpit door mattered

An airline cockpit is designed so either pilot can fly the aircraft. Each seat has flight controls and instruments, allowing one pilot to carry on if the other becomes incapacitated.

Even an ordinary handover follows a clear exchange:

“You have control.” “I have control.”

There should be no doubt about who is flying.

But that arrangement depends on cooperation between the two people sitting there. On FZ1073, according to the UAE Attorney-General’s account, the threat came from the seat beside the captain.

Captain Smit Machchhar says he was injured during the attack and still managed to unlock the cockpit door.

For me, that is one of the most consequential details in this story.

Since the September 2001 attacks, reinforced cockpit doors have become a central part of airline security. Their purpose is to prevent someone in the cabin from forcing their way onto the flight deck.

Access is controlled through established procedures. I won’t go into their operational details here.

On this flight, the help the captain needed was on the other side of that door.

By his account, he got it open while being attacked.

We practise taking over from an incapacitated colleague. We practise emergencies that leave one pilot carrying a much heavier workload. Being attacked by the person beside you is far removed from those scenarios.

The investigation will establish the full sequence. But the captain’s account explains how people in the cabin were able to intervene.

A crash axe, incidentally, is emergency equipment. It is carried for tasks such as gaining access behind panels during a fire. Its presence on a flight deck is not, by itself, unusual. Its alleged use against a pilot is.

The flight file: what is established

The following comes from official statements and published flight-tracking data available on October 6.

The flight. FZ1073 departed Dubai for Tel Aviv on September 30 at 03:05 UTC. The aircraft was a Boeing 737 MAX 8, registration A6-FKF.

The attack. The UAE Attorney-General said the co-pilot attacked the captain inside the flight deck using a crash axe and attempted to take control of the aircraft. His statement described an attempted terrorist act, while making clear that the investigation remained ongoing.

The intervention. Flydubai said on-duty crew members travelling on the flight secured the aircraft, diverted it and landed safely at Tabuk. The airline’s chief executive thanked the captain, the pilots who secured and landed the aircraft, the cabin crew, and the passengers who assisted.

The outcome. Flydubai’s latest published statement says all 172 passengers and crew are safe and being cared for. That includes the captain, who returned to the UAE following medical clearance.

The airline has not publicly provided a complete account of who was at the controls at each stage.

That distinction matters. Recognising the people who helped does not require us to fill in the gaps ourselves.

Sources: flydubai’s statements, the UAE Attorney-General’s October 3 statement, and Flightradar24’s flight timeline.

Reading the descent like a pilot 👇🏻

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Pilot Nick - 7 min read

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You’re two hours out of Barcelona. Lunch is cleared away, the window shades are half down, and the moving map shows the little airplane well past Portugal with nothing ahead but blue.

Then you smell it. It’s faint at first, then it isn’t, and a thin haze is hanging under the reading lights a few rows up. A flight attendant walks past a little faster than flight attendants usually walk.

Nobody makes an announcement for a while. It feels like a very long while.

That was the cabin of DL251 on Sunday afternoon. Up front, those same minutes were some of the busiest two people can have in a cockpit, and almost everything they did was decided years before either of them sat down.

The decision that looked like nothing

Most of the coverage focuses on the smoke, the hospital and the cancelled flights. What I noticed was the turn.

Two hours into an eight-and-a-half-hour flight, a widebody full of fuel and 296 people changed direction and flew about an hour back to Europe. To the passengers it must have looked like the airplane was just banking. That turn was the most important thing anyone did on Sunday, and it probably came within a couple of minutes of the first report from the cabin.

In airline flying, smoke is the abnormal event where you don’t wait to see what happens. With an engine failure you have time to think. Smoke gives you less time than any other problem, and every pilot is trained to treat it that way.

Why diverting now comes first

Our smoke procedures used to run the other way round: find the source, then decide whether to divert. The industry learned the hard way that a fire hidden behind a panel doesn’t wait for your checklist.

After 1998 the industry flipped the order. On the Airbus today, landing as soon as possible is one of the first items in the smoke procedure, right at the top of the page. You start heading for the ground before you know what’s burning. If it turns out to be a burnt croissant in a galley oven, you’ve lost an hour and some fuel. If it’s something worse, you’re already on your way down.

Every smoke checklist written since 1998 carries the lessons of Swissair 111. I wrote about that flight here👇🏻

The first two minutes, step by step

Delta hasn’t released the crew’s account, and nobody outside that cockpit knows exactly what was said. What I can tell you is the sequence every widebody crew is trained to fly when the cabin calls with the word “smoke.”

Step 1: Oxygen masks on, pilots first. The pilots put on their own masks before doing anything else. On the A330 these are full-face masks with built-in goggles, and in an emergency they deliver 100% oxygen under slight pressure so smoke can’t leak in around the seal. It takes a few seconds. A pilot who is coughing can’t fly, and a pilot whose eyes are streaming can’t read the checklist.

In your seat: if you ever see your pilots come on the PA sounding muffled, like they’re talking through a snorkel, that’s the mask. They’re following procedure.

Step 2: Point the airplane at land. One pilot flies and handles the radio. The other starts the diversion. On Sunday, “land” was behind them, so they turned around. Porto was close to the reversed track and has a runway more than 3 km long, a fire service equipped for widebody aircraft, and hospitals nearby. Pilots call that the nearest suitable airport. The word “suitable” matters: the nearest airport on the map might be a strip that can’t take an A330.

In your seat: the turn you feel in the first few minutes of any problem is usually the decision already made. The explanation over the PA comes later, once the crew has time for it.

Step 3: Find it and cut it off. In the cabin, flight attendants go looking for the source, sometimes wearing a smoke hood (PBE, protective breathing equipment) with its own oxygen supply. They check galley ovens, lavatories, overhead bins, in-seat power. In the cockpit, the checklist takes the pilots through shutting off electrical systems that could be feeding it, and on the Airbus that includes the fans that recirculate cabin air. Much of the time, once the power to the source is cut, the smoke begins to clear.

In your seat: if a crew member asks what you smelled and where, answer precisely. “Burning plastic, near the left galley, five minutes ago” is exactly what the pilots need.

Step 4: Tell everyone. Squawk 7700 is the emergency code the pilots dial into the transponder. It lights up the airplane on every radar screen that can see it, and controllers clear the airspace ahead. On the ground in Porto, that call set off a Level 2 alert: around 60 responders and 22 vehicles waiting by the runway before the wheels touched. In the cabin, the purser is briefed on how bad it is, how long until landing, and whether to prepare for an evacuation.

In your seat: the fire trucks chasing you down the runway are part of the plan. Porto rolled out for DL251 the same way it rolls out for every aircraft that declares.

Step 5: Land heavy. Two hours into a transatlantic flight, an A330 still has most of its fuel in the tanks, and that probably put it above its normal maximum landing weight. Not every A330 can dump fuel, and Delta hasn’t said what this crew did. For exactly this situation, Airbus allows an overweight landing: a careful touchdown followed by a maintenance inspection. In a real emergency, getting on the ground is worth more than getting down to a lighter weight.

In your seat: the landing may feel firmer than usual. The crew does that deliberately, and the airplane is built for it.

That’s the sequence in the first few minutes. You won’t find it in the news reports, which mostly read smoke, emergency, landed. There’s more worth understanding, though, including what the smell tells the crew and why nobody on DL251 went down the slides.

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Pilot Nick - 10 mn read

As I write this, it’s Monday night in Tokyo, and Typhoon Dujuan, the 25th storm of the season, is about 130 km off the Chiba coast with winds of 144 km/h.

Japan Airlines has cancelled 135 flights. All Nippon Airways, 140. Count every carrier at Haneda and Narita, and some reports put the total close to 500.

And yet, on the edges of that storm, airliners are still landing. See below the video

Landing in the outer bands of Typhoon Dujuan.

That’s what it looks like from a window seat: grey, wet, loud, and over in thirty seconds.

What you can’t see is the nine hours of work behind it. The fuel that was loaded for this exact approach. The crosswind number the crew checked against a hard limit. The go-around they briefed and didn’t need. The reason that touchdown was firm on purpose.

Most coverage stops at the cancellation count. This post starts there.

So I’m trying something different today. I’m going to take you through a typhoon arrival the way a crew works through it, phase by phase, with the actual numbers, limits and procedures. The briefing passengers never hear.

Watch the video once now. Then watch it again when you’ve finished reading. You’ll see different things the second time.

Two disclaimers before we start.

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Phase 0: Convert the headline ✈️

First thing any pilot does with a storm headline: convert it.

144 km/h is 78 knots. On the Japan Meteorological Agency scale, which uses 10-minute average winds, that makes Dujuan a “strong” typhoon (64 to 84 knots). Above that comes “very strong” (85 to 104) and “violent” (105 and up).

Now compare 78 knots with what an airliner can accept across the runway: typically somewhere in the 30s of knots on a dry runway, less on a wet one.

So nobody lands near the core. Those 275 cancellations aren’t caution. They’re arithmetic.

But a typhoon is hundreds of kilometers wide, and its wind field fades with distance. On the edges, airports stay open with winds that are strong but legal. That’s where everything below applies.

Phase 1: Reading the weather picture

We don’t get our typhoon information from the news. We get it from four products.

The tropical cyclone advisory. Tokyo hosts one of the world’s Tropical Cyclone Advisory Centres. It publishes the storm’s position, movement, central pressure and maximum wind, with forecast positions out to 24 hours and beyond. That track is what dispatch overlays on our arrival time.

The SIGMET. A warning to all aircraft of a hazard area to avoid en route. For a typhoon it defines the cyclone’s position and the radius of the cumulonimbus around it.

The TAF. The airport forecast. On a typhoon day you hunt for two things: the gust figures, and the TEMPO groups, which describe temporary conditions lasting less than an hour at a time. A forecast that is legal in its base conditions but illegal in its TEMPO is a forecast that says “bring holding fuel.”

The METAR. The actual observation, every 30 minutes. An illustrative one (not tonight’s real report) might read:

RJAA 210900Z 09040G60KT 3000 +SHRA BKN008 FEW015CB 24/23 Q0985

Translation: Narita, the 21st at 0900 UTC. Wind from 090 degrees at 40 knots, gusting 60. Visibility 3,000 meters in heavy rain showers. Cloud base 800 feet, with cumulonimbus at 1,500. Temperature 24, dew point 23. Pressure 985 hectopascals, which is very low.

One more piece of storm geometry pilots carry around. In the northern hemisphere, the right-hand side of the storm’s track is the dangerous semicircle. There, the storm’s rotation and its forward speed add together. On the left, they partly cancel. Which side of the track your airport sits on changes the wind by tens of knots.

Phase 2: The crosswind math

That wind of 090 at 40 gusting 60 means nothing until you compare it to the runway.

Narita’s runways are 16/34, pointing roughly 160 and 340 degrees. Wind from 090 onto runway 16 is 70 degrees off the nose. Crosswind component is wind speed times the sine of that angle: sin 70° is 0.94.

Crosswind: 38 knots, gusting 56. Headwind component: only 14. That runway is closed to you, whatever the airport’s status says.

In the cockpit we don’t do trigonometry. We use the clock code: 15 degrees off gives a quarter of the wind as crosswind, 30 degrees gives half, 45 degrees gives three quarters, and from 60 degrees on, you take all of it.

Two details matter here.

First, the published figure in the flight manual is a maximum demonstrated crosswind: what test pilots showed during certification, on a dry runway. Operators then set their own hard limits, usually lower on wet or contaminated surfaces, and lower again for less experienced pilots. Whether gusts count against the limit is a company policy decision too.

Second, runway layout. Haneda has four runways in two orientations (16/34 and 04/22, 05/23), so controllers can often offer one closer to the wind. Narita’s two runways are parallel, and the third one under construction is parallel as well. When the wind swings across at Narita, there’s no better option on the field.

Phase 3: The fuel ladder

This is the part of typhoon flying that matters most, and it all happens before engine start.

Every airline flight carries fuel in layers:

Taxi fuel, then trip fuel to the destination. Contingency fuel, typically 5% of trip fuel, for the unforeseen. Alternate fuel: a missed approach at destination, then the flight to the alternate. And final reserve: 30 minutes of holding at 1,500 feet above the alternate for a jet. That last layer is sacred. You plan never to touch it.

On top sits extra fuel, at the captain’s discretion. On a typhoon day, that’s where the real decisions live.

Here’s what people miss: a typhoon doesn’t close one airport. It can close every airport in the region at the same time. Then dozens of aircraft all need somewhere else to go at once, and the nearby alternates fill up or close too.

So we plan for exactly that. We carry plenty of fuel to hold over the destination and wait for a gap, and then still fly to an alternate far away from it, well clear of the storm’s footprint, and land there with reserves intact. For Tokyo, that’s thinking Osaka or Nagoya, or further, not the airport next door. Holding fuel and far-alternate fuel aren’t either/or. We take both.

There’s a cost. Extra fuel is extra weight, which means a higher approach speed and a longer landing roll on a wet runway. Occasionally it’s a payload problem too. Fuel is never free, which is why the amount is a decision and not a reflex.

And if it all goes wrong, there’s a precise vocabulary. “Minimum fuel“ tells ATC we’re committed to one airport and any further delay will eat into final reserve. It’s information, not an emergency. “Mayday, mayday, mayday, fuel“ means we now expect to land with less than final reserve. That one gets you priority, and a report to write.

I learned why this ladder matters on December 26, 1999.

I was a first officer when storm Lothar crossed France, Switzerland and Germany in a few hours, with gusts well over 150 km/h. We were flying along its edges. The approaches were the roughest I had ever flown. The airspeed needle was breathing like something alive. Behind the cockpit door, passengers were being sick.

Into Munich, the numbers wouldn’t hold still. We went around, and we diverted to Amsterdam.

It was miserable for everyone in the back. But the decision itself was undramatic, because the fuel to make it was already in the tanks. That’s what the ladder buys you: the ability to say no.

That’s the planning. Everything so far happens before the top of descent.

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Pilot Nick - 9 min read

What happened

On September 6, 2026, at 17:53 UTC, a Boeing 767-300 freighter registered N1997A, operated by 21 Air on behalf of Amazon Air, landed on runway 30 at Miami International Airport at the end of a flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico. Two crew members were on board. It was the aircraft’s third rotation of the day, after Cincinnati to Miami and Miami to San Juan.

It did not stop on the runway. According to the sequence established by the NTSB, the aircraft went past the northwest end of the runway, struck navigation aids, then hit a van belonging to a contract cleaning company, parked inside the airport boundary with seven people on board. It then went through a fence and struck a car travelling on Northwest 67th Avenue before coming to rest beside a parking lot. A fire broke out.

The FAA announced an investigation. The NTSB sent a team of thirty-two and held a first press briefing on September 7 at 4 p.m. local time, without releasing any technical findings. Nothing below prejudges their conclusions. It is only what the public ADS-B trace, made available for download by Flightradar24, allows us to establish once it is re-referenced to the official geometry of the airfield.

The runway

Runway 30/12 is 9,360 feet long. That is the full pavement length. Landing-performance calculations use a different number.

For a landing on runway 30 the threshold is displaced by 945 feet, meaning the usable landing area begins that far beyond the physical start of the runway. The FAA declared distances apply a further reduction at the far end. The landing distance available, or LDA, is 7,913 feet, or 2,412 metres. Runway 12/30 is also the only runway at the airport not aligned with the other three, whose full pavement lengths are 8,600, 10,506 and 13,016 feet.

The 7,913-foot figure is the basis for the landing-distance comparison here. If the estimated touchdown position is correct, roughly 4,100 feet remained within the declared landing distance, with about 4,600 feet of pavement to the runway end. The stopping margin also depended on landing weight, speed, runway condition and the deceleration achieved after touchdown..

What the trace shows

The file contains 537 timestamped position points, with barometric altitude, ground speed and heading. The sampling is irregular, from several minutes apart in cruise down to two or three seconds over the last two minutes of the flight.

The analysis that follows was done from the trace downloaded on the morning of September 7 and re-referenced to the official runway geometry, using the FAA-published coordinates of the two runway ends as the axis and the origin. It is not my work. I have checked the numbers against the approach plate, the METAR and the ADS-B Exchange track, and I present them here with my own reading as a line pilot. The data is public, and anyone can download the same files and repeat the same steps.

The profile reads in three stages, and that breakdown matters a great deal more than the simple observation of a high approach.

From 11 NM to 5 NM from the threshold, the aircraft descends on a 3-degree path with a deviation between 13 and 41 feet, and a lateral deviation of less than 0.06 degrees from the runway centreline. That is instrument-guidance precision, and nothing on this segment announces what comes next.

Between 4.6 and 3 NM, the aircraft stops descending and holds between 1,550 and 1,600 feet. The 3-degree path keeps going down and passes underneath it. In about thirty seconds the deviation grows from 123 to 501 feet, with the aircraft even regaining 50 feet of altitude along the way. This is where the vertical margin was lost, and nowhere else. The level segment coincides with a fall in ground speed, from 227 knots shortly before it to 180 during it, followed by a recovery to 195.

The ILS or LOC RWY 30 approach chart in force that day gives this segment its full meaning. The glideslope is set at 3.00 degrees and crosses the threshold at 51 feet. The published intercept fix, BIRDD, carries an altitude of 1,600 feet and sits 4.8 NM from the threshold. The aircraft reaches 1,600 feet at 4.8 NM, exactly where it was supposed to, and that is the point from which it stops descending. So it did not fall off a path it was holding. It arrived at the right place, at the right altitude, and did not begin the final descent. The glideslope passed beneath it.

From 2.2 NM the descent resumes at 5.4 and then 6.7 degrees, more than double the published slope. This is a catch-up dive rather than an approach running parallel to the path and offset above it, and it never converges. The slope only eases back toward 4.4 degrees over the last 2,000 feet, when there is no longer enough height left to recover the speed as well. The aircraft crosses the threshold at 110 feet above the ground, instead of the 50-foot reference, at 177 knots ground speed.

Laterally, centreline tracking stays excellent until 1.4 NM, then the aircraft drifts up to 129 feet right of centreline near 1 NM before converging again. The drift begins at the precise moment the catch-up dive starts.

Touchdown is around 3,800 feet past the displaced threshold, with an uncertainty of about 400 feet due to the quantisation step of the transmitted altitude. The regulatory touchdown zone ends at 3,000 feet. Ground speed at contact is 159 knots.

Touchdown, seen from the ground. The trace puts it around 3,800 feet past the displaced threshold.

The weather

The sequence of hourly observations at Miami says a lot. At 17:13, wind variable at 3 knots. At 17:53, the time of touchdown, wind from 190 at 17 knots gusting 26, with two decisive entries in the coded remarks: a wind shift recorded at 17:37, and a peak wind measured from 180 at 26 knots at 17:52, one minute before the landing. By 18:53 the wind had dropped back to calm. A thunderstorm was over the field, and the cell passed through during the landing. On runway 30, the reported wind implies a tailwind component of about six knots, increasing to roughly nine knots if the 26-knot gust came from the same direction. However, the remarks record a separate peak wind from 180° at 26 knots at 17:52 UTC. That corresponds to a tailwind component of approximately thirteen knots. These figures are calculated from airport weather observations; they do not establish the exact wind the aircraft encountered during the flare and touchdown.

Two other aircraft flew the same approach that afternoon, one twenty minutes before, one two minutes after. Their traces are what turn a single profile into evidence, and they're below.

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Pilot Nick — 9 min read

You’re somewhere over the North Atlantic, seat reclined as far as economy allows.

Dinner trays are cleared. The cabin lights are dimmed to that amber half-dark of every overnight crossing. Someone two rows up laughs at their movie. Outside the window there’s nothing at all — black water under a black sky.

You trust, without ever thinking the word “trust,” that the two people up front will notice anything wrong long before you do.

We take that seriously. And twenty-eight years ago this week, on a night exactly like the one you’re picturing, two pilots noticed something wrong three and a half minutes before they told anyone.

It still wasn’t enough.

Welcome back to Black Box — the series where I take the aviation incidents that made history and break them down the way a pilot actually thinks about them.

Not the dramatized version. Not the Wikipedia summary. The cockpit view: what the crew saw, what they decided, what they felt — and what it teaches us about how flying became one of the safest things you can do on this planet.

This episode is different from the ones before it. BA009 had a happy ending. This one doesn’t. But no single flight taught modern aviation more and if you’ve ever wondered what happens when pilots smell smoke, this is the story behind the answer.

Let’s go back to that night.

What happened on September 2, 1998 ✈️

Swissair Flight 111, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, lifted off from New York JFK at 8:18 p.m. bound for Geneva. On board: 215 passengers, 14 crew. A routine red-eye for one of the most respected airlines in the world, Swissair was so trusted the Swiss called it “the flying bank.”

Fifty-three minutes into the flight, cruising at FL330 — 33,000 feet, the captain and first officer noticed an odd smell in the cockpit. A few minutes later, a wisp of visible smoke. Then, strangely, it seemed to clear.

They read it as an air conditioning problem. And honestly? Most of us would have. Bleed air systems produce strange smells often enough that every airline pilot I know has a story about one. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that smell is nothing.

Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds after the first whiff, they radioed “Pan Pan Pan” — the international call one notch below Mayday and asked to divert. They picked Halifax, Nova Scotia, ran the checklist for smoke of unknown origin, and set up for the approach. They asked to dump fuel, because the jet was well above its maximum landing weight.

What they could not know: above the ceiling panels behind the cockpit, a fire was crawling through the insulation. No detector up there. No extinguisher. Not even an access panel to look through.

Thirteen minutes after the first smell, the flight data recorder began logging system failures in rapid succession. The autopilot dropped out. Displays went dark, one after another. The crew declared an emergency. A minute later the radios and both recorders quit — the last five and a half minutes of that flight exist only in radar returns and wreckage.

At 10:31 p.m. local time, about five nautical miles off a small fishing village called Peggy’s Cove, the MD-11 hit the ocean. All 229 people aboard died.

From first smell to impact: about 21 minutes.

The line the documentaries get wrong

Every retelling of this accident eventually circles the same question: should they have skipped the checklist and dived for the runway?

Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada spent four and a half years on that question. They pulled 98 per cent of the airplane off the seabed, piece by piece, and rebuilt the forward fuselage in a hangar. Then they ran the numbers on a perfect emergency: no checklist, no fuel dump, an immediate maximum-effort descent to Halifax from the moment of the first smell.

The airplane still doesn’t make it. The fire moved faster than physics allowed any approach to be flown.

Sit with that for a second, because it’s the hardest sentence in the whole report and the one nobody puts in a headline: the crew was not the problem. If they had been, the fix would have been simple — train better pilots. Instead, the industry had to face something far more expensive. The airplane itself was wrong. And so were hundreds of others flying that same night.

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The spark and the fuel

The TSB traced the fire’s most likely origin to an arcing wire —a power cable feeding the in-flight entertainment network, a seat-back video and gambling system added to Swissair’s MD-11s after they left the factory, under a supplemental approval process that never seriously examined how it fit into the rest of the aircraft.

An arc, on its own, is just a spark. Sparks need fuel.

The fuel was the insulation. The MD-11’s thermal acoustic blankets — the quilted batting that keeps a cabin warm and quiet — were covered in metallized PET, a film that had passed the flammability test of its era. In a lab, with a small vertical flame, it looked fine. In a real airplane, once ignited, it carried fire along the crown of the fuselage like a fuse.

A spark from a system that shouldn’t have been wired the way it was. Fuel from a material that should never have passed its test. Burning in a space no crew could see, reach, or fight.

That’s what killed 229 people. Not a bad decision. A blind spot the whole industry shared.

You now know what happened that night, the spark, the fuel, and the hardest finding of all: that no crew alive could have outflown it.

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The original file, published in August, follows below 👇🏻

Pilot Nick - 7 min read

Seat 24A, Munich, Saturday afternoon, 15 August.

The engines spool up, the seat presses into your back, the runway lights start to smear past the window. Then it keeps going, longer than you remember, and the far end of the runway stops being an idea and starts being a thing you can see.

The nose finally comes up. There is a thud somewhere behind you. The aeroplane climbs away, and a few minutes later the captain tells you that you are going back to Munich.

That was Vietnam Airlines flight VN34, a Boeing 787-9 bound for Hanoi with 271 passengers and 16 crew. Everybody walked off it. Ten days later, the part I keep coming back to is the two hours after the tail hit the ground.

What we actually know

Confirmed by the German BFU, which is leading the investigation: the aircraft rotated late on runway 26L, a runway 4,000 metres long. Its tail contacted the ground during the rotation, leaving longitudinal scrape marks along the underside of the rear fuselage. It went past the paved surface before it was properly flying, damaging lights at the runway end. Four of the eight main gear tyres burst, and the breakdown matters: numbers 1, 3 and 5 on the left main gear, and number 3 on the right.

The crew’s account is worth reading slowly. Around halfway down the runway, the speed stopped increasing for about two seconds. It picked up again. Then, at V1, they saw it decrease a second time. They judged there was no longer enough runway to stop on, pushed the thrust levers to maximum, and rotated with roughly 300 feet of concrete left. The warnings arrived once they were airborne: a tail strike, and tyre pressure problems.

They told air traffic control they were coming back, dumped fuel down to landing weight, and flew two low circuits so controllers on the ground could look at the gear with their own eyes. They landed on runway 26R at 15:57 local, about two hours after they had left. No injuries.

The evidence on the concrete

Photographs of the departure end of 26L show two long dark skid tracks running off the paved surface and into the grass, one from each main gear, getting heavier towards the end. That is the signature of wheels that have stopped rolling freely and started dragging. Video review puts the right main gear braking from roughly 210 metres before the runway end, with those wheels locked at and past it, and aerial photographs the following day indicate both brakes were active before the end.

Both sides show marks, so this was not one seized wheel. But three of the four burst tyres are on the left, and the left gear is the one that came back trailing smoke and left the aeroplane disabled on the runway. Whatever was happening was heavier on the left, and that asymmetry has a consequence the crew would have felt. Drag on one side pulls the nose towards it, and holding the centreline against it takes rudder and takes attention, at exactly the speed where a pilot has least of both to spare.

Why the brakes are the question

The 787 has electric brakes, the first airliner in service built that way, using a system from Safran Landing Systems. On every other big jet, pressing the pedals sends hydraulic pressure down a brake line to squeeze the carbon discs. On the 787 there is no brake line and no hydraulic fluid at the wheel. Pedal movement becomes an electrical signal, controllers interpret it, and electric motors on each brake unit clamp the discs directly.

That changes the shape of this investigation. A hydraulic brake drags when a valve sticks or a seal fails, and you find that with a spanner. An electric brake drags when an actuator, a controller or the logic behind them holds clamping force nobody asked for, and you find that in data and software.

One more thing before the theories, because it decided how this flight ended. V1 is the last speed at which we can stop on the runway that remains. One knot after it, the runway behind us is too short to stop in, so we take the problem into the air. The second speed decrease came after V1, so there was no decision left to make. The crew’s job became getting the aeroplane airborne, which they did at the cost of a tail strike and four tyres.

Metal is cheap. That trade is one we brief out loud before every departure.

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Pilot Nick - 4mn read

Concorde cruised at Mach 2, above 50,000 feet, where the air was too thin to breathe and the aircraft’s skin could heat to 127°C.

You would think an aeroplane like that belonged in clear skies, miles above the weather.

Then you open the Air France Concorde Operating Manual and find something rather unexpected:

Category 3. Decision height: 10 feet. Minimum use height: zero. Runway visual range: 150 metres.

In other words, the fastest passenger aircraft ever built was also certified to land itself in fog so thick that the pilots might not see the runway until they were almost on it.

And it did it with technology designed in the 1960s.

France had already done it with the Caravelle

Concorde wasn’t France’s first CAT III aircraft.

On 9 January 1969, an Air Inter Caravelle arrived at Orly from Lyon with 56 passengers on board. The airport was covered in fog. Captain Larribière let the aircraft fly the approach and landing automatically.

It became the first automatic landing in commercial service under Category 3 conditions in French civil aviation.

The approval had come two months earlier, after years of testing. Trials had been running since 1962, and a Caravelle had already made a zero-visibility automatic landing at Toulouse in March 1963.

Exactly who deserves to be called “first” is still debated. The Caravelle, Hawker Siddeley Trident and Smiths Industries prototypes all have a claim, depending on whether you mean the first experimental autoland, the first certification or the first one carrying passengers.

But one thing is clear: France was at the very front of the race to make airliners land automatically in dense fog.

And that experience mattered when Concorde came along.

Sud Aviation, which developed the Caravelle, became part of Aérospatiale, which assembled Concorde at Toulouse. There wasn’t much direct technical inheritance between the two systems. Concorde’s electronics, sensors, monitoring and servos were completely different.

What carried over was something harder to put on a wiring diagram: experience.

The engineers already knew an automatic landing could be made reliable enough for airline service and they knew what it took to convince the certification authorities.

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Concorde made the problem much harder

By the 1970s, autoland itself was no longer unique. The Boeing 747 received CAT III certification in 1971. The Trident followed with CAT IIIa in 1972 and CAT IIIb in 1975.

But neither of them landed like Concorde.

Concorde approached at around 14 degrees angle of attack, nose drooped, on a delta wing with no flaps or slats.

That 14-degree attitude wasn’t for show. Concorde had no conventional high-lift devices. On approach, the delta wing had to generate the lift itself, helped by the powerful vortices forming over the wing.

The result was a very nose-high approach.

Even with the famous droop nose lowered, the view ahead was restricted. The aircraft was fast, draggy, and operating with less energy margin than a conventional airliner.

On a 747, the flaps generate enormous amounts of lift while allowing the aircraft to fly at a relatively modest angle of attack.

Concorde didn’t have that luxury.

If speed began to decay or thrust came back too quickly, things could deteriorate rapidly.

And then there was the landing gear.

The main gear sat a long way aft under the delta wing. Changes in aircraft weight and centre of gravity altered the geometry at touchdown, which made programming the automatic flare particularly difficult.

The system somehow had to take this fast, nose-high, flapless delta and place its main wheels precisely onto the runway.

In fog.

Automatically.

Every time.

Concorde had its own rulebook

Even its certification was unusual.

Concorde was approved under TSS Standard 1-2 — Transport SuperSonique, a regulatory framework written specifically for the aircraft.

The numbers in the Air France manual are remarkable:

Decision height: 10 ft
Minimum use height: 0 ft
Runway visual range: 150 m
Maximum headwind: 25 kt
Maximum tailwind: 10 kt
Maximum crosswind: 15 kt

For US operations, the crosswind limit was reduced to 10 kt.

And all of this was being achieved with analogue technology.

Two autopilots and two very important green lights

Concorde had two autopilots: AP1 and AP2.

For a full CAT III automatic landing, they could work together in LAND mode. In front of the pilots, two landing situation indicators showed exactly what capability remained.

A green LAND 2 light meant at least one autopilot was operating correctly in LAND mode.

That was enough to perform an automatic landing, but the system was fail-passive. There was no longer another complete channel waiting to take over.

LAND 3 was the one you really wanted.

It meant both autopilots were engaged, both autothrottles were operating correctly in IAS ACQ mode, and the split system bus separating the two autopilot channels was open.

Now the system was fail-operational.

If one autopilot failed on short final, the other could take over and continue the automatic landing.

And the crew didn’t simply trust that redundancy was there.

Before every CAT III approach, they tested it.

The captain disconnected AP1. LAND 3 disappeared and LAND 2 illuminated. The crew checked that AP2 was still flying the aircraft correctly.

Then AP1 went back on.

LAND 3 returned.

Only then had the system proved that it could lose an autopilot and keep flying.

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PIlot Nick — ✈️ 8 min read

You’re in 27A, halfway through a flight, and the captain comes on to say we’ll be holding for twenty minutes before landing.

The cabin does that small collective shift. And somewhere in the back of your mind, a question surfaces that nobody says out loud: do we have enough fuel for that?

You picture a gauge. You picture a needle. You think about your car on the motorway with the orange light on.

Up in the cockpit, I’m not thinking about a needle at all. I’m thinking about a number I calculated ninety minutes before you boarded and twenty minutes of holding was already in it.

The Reframe

Here’s the part that surprises almost everyone: we don’t fill the tanks.

Not usually. Not close. A long-haul jet leaves the gate with tanks that are often nowhere near full, and a short regional flight can leave with less fuel than the trip to the airport used in your car proportionally speaking.

People assume this is about money. Airlines being cheap. It isn’t, or at least it isn’t only that.

It’s physics. Fuel is heavy. Every kilo of fuel you load has to be lifted off the runway, accelerated to 500 knots, and held up in the air for the entire flight and lifting it and holding it burns fuel. Carry an extra ton across the Atlantic and you’ll burn a meaningful slice of that ton just transporting the rest of it. It also comes straight out of what the aircraft can carry in passengers and cargo.

We call it the cost of carriage. Fuel you don’t need isn’t free insurance. It’s ballast you pay for by the mile.

So instead of filling up, we build a number. And the number gets built the same way every single time, on every airline, on every flight in the world.

What Happened Over The Atlantic

A few winters back, westbound over the North Atlantic, the destination forecast was doing that infuriating thing forecasts do low cloud, a front that couldn’t commit to an arrival time, and all of it predicted twelve hours before we’d actually need it.

I’m standing at the flight plan with a coffee going cold, and I’m adding.

Two tonnes for the weather. Another for the holding I’m imagining. Something for an alternate airport I don’t much like the look of.

My first officer asked the question that reorganised my thinking: “What are we protecting against and when do we actually find out if it’s real?”

The answer was: over Ireland. Five and a half hours in. Not now, in the dark, at a gate in North America, guessing at a forecast that was still half a day from being tested.

So we carried enough to reach the point where we’d know, plus everything the rules require and not one tonne more for the stories I was inventing about what came after. As it turned out, the front cleared early. We landed comfortably.

That’s really what fuel planning is. Not “how much can we take?” but “how much do we need to still have every option open at the moment we have to choose?”

How The Number Actually Gets Built

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Pilot Nick - 6 min read

Around 180 people were sitting on a British Airways A320 at 3,000 feet over London on 6 July, on their second attempt at landing at Heathrow, when the stall warning went off for the second time that evening.

The aircraft lost roughly 800 feet, swung left of the approach path, then came back onto it, lined up with the runway and landed. Passengers described a violent manoeuvre and screaming in the cabin. Nobody was hurt. Nothing was damaged.

I’ve watched the coverage build all week, and reporters have run a long way ahead of the facts. The official account of that flight is about forty words long. Almost everything dramatic you’ve read came from somewhere else.

So this is the flight in the order it happened, from someone who flies that approach for a living.

What the investigators have actually said

British Airways flight BA919 was inbound from Düsseldorf. On the first approach, one of the aircraft’s air data units failed. That triggered a stall warning, the flight control system dropped into a simpler mode called alternate law, and the crew declared a PAN.

They broke off the approach and went into a holding pattern to work the problem. Coming back in, a second stall warning sounded at 3,000 feet, followed by what the AAIB calls “a potentially abrupt recovery manoeuvre.” The crew upgraded the PAN to a MAYDAY, which cleared them straight in.

They landed about thirty minutes after abandoning the first approach.

That’s the whole official account. The AAIB has opened an investigation and published no cause. It has not said the aircraft stalled. It has not attributed anything to any crew member.

That last sentence has gone missing from most of the coverage.

What actually broke

An air data unit is the aircraft’s source of truth about the air it’s flying through. Speed, altitude, pressure. Those numbers feed your instruments, and they feed the computers that decide what the aeroplane is allowed to do.

Normally those computers will not let you fly the A320 outside its safe limits. You can pull the stick fully back and the aircraft simply refuses to stall. All of that protection is built on trusting the speed reading.

When an air data unit fails, the computers lose confidence in the speed they’re being fed, so they hand more control back to the pilots. The aeroplane still flies exactly as it did a second earlier. Some of the automatic safety net thins out, and the crew flies it more by hand, following a procedure every airline pilot practises in the simulator.

There’s an awkward consequence. Once that safety net is gone, the aircraft can no longer prevent a stall, so it warns you about one instead. And that warning is calculated from the same suspect speed reading.

So a stall warning in that situation might be real, or it might be a ghost produced by bad numbers. The crew gets a few seconds to work out which. Responding to a real one costs altitude, and guessing wrong in either direction is expensive.

That ambiguity is the hard part of this flight. I suspect it’s most of what the investigation is about.

The four things that crew got right

Read the sequence again with a pilot’s eyes and you can see a procedure running underneath it.

They flew the aeroplane first. When the speed reading can’t be trusted, the opening move is to set a known attitude and a known power setting, from memory, no discussion. You put the aircraft in a shape you know produces flight, and you sort out the instruments afterwards.

They stopped trying to land. A go-around with a degraded aircraft over west London is the cheapest decision on the menu. Every problem gets easier with height and time, and both of those you can only buy by climbing away.

They bought time in the hold. This is the part passengers never see. That holding pattern is where the checklists get run, the fault gets identified, the landing numbers get recalculated, and two people say out loud what they’re about to do next. Circling for twenty minutes is what a crew does when nothing is on fire and they’ve decided to spend time rather than luck.

They said the words that clear the airport. PAN is the international call for an urgent problem that isn’t yet life-threatening. MAYDAY means distress, and it hands you the runway, the radio and every fire truck at Heathrow. Upgrading from one to the other mid-approach is a crew deciding they’d rather have too much help than too little.

None of that would make a decent film. That’s rather the point of the job.

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Pilot Nick - 9 min read

Is It Actually Safe to Fly a Boeing Right Now?

Two Boeing headlines landed ten days apart this month. One of them looks much worse than it is, and the other one is the reason I’m not worried.

Pilot Nick - 9 min read

You booked the flight weeks ago. Last night you opened the seat map, saw the aircraft type in small grey letters (737 MAX 8), and made the mistake of searching it.

Two stories came back, both from the past two weeks. One said the FAA is letting Boeing sign off on the safety of its own airplanes again. The other said 453 Boeing 737 MAX jets registered in the US may have passenger seats that were installed wrong.

So now you’re holding a boarding pass and trying to run a risk calculation with no instruments.

I fly for a living, and when both of those crossed my feed I read them the way pilots read everything, which is looking for the part the headline left out. Both stories are true. Neither one would move me off that flight. How I got there is more useful to you than my saying so, so that’s what the rest of this is.

The question is aimed at the wrong thing

“Is it safe to fly a Boeing” sounds like a question about metal. But the manufacturer is one of the weakest predictors of whether a given flight goes well.

One number in IATA’s 2025 safety report does most of the work here. Across 38.7 million flights there were 51 accidents, and the long-run rate has fallen from 3.72 per million flights in 2005 to 1.32 last year. Fine. Now look at how that risk sits. IATA member airlines ran 0.72 accidents per million flights. Non-members ran 3.09. Same skies, same weather, airplanes rolling out of the same handful of factories. The gap is a factor of four, and it’s about how the airline is run.

I won’t soften the other half of that report. 2025 was the worst year for airline fatalities since 2018, with eight fatal accidents and 394 people lost, and the worst single event was a Boeing 787. Air India 171 went down 32 seconds after takeoff from Ahmedabad, killing 260 people. Anyone telling you aviation had a quiet year is reading a different document.

That report also shows how tightly those deaths concentrated. Air India 171 and the PSA Airlines midair over the Potomac accounted for more than 77% of everyone lost on board an aircraft last year. Fatal accidents involving large jets are rare enough now that two of them move the global number.

So the question worth asking isn’t about the badge on the tail. It’s what stands between a known problem and your seat.

What actually happened in July

On July 17 the FAA announced that Boeing can again issue airworthiness certificates for finished 737 MAX and 787 airplanes, effective the 20th. That restored a delegated paperwork authority the agency stripped in 2019 after the Lion Air and Ethiopian crashes, and again for the 787 in 2022 over production quality. The scope is a lot narrower than the headline suggests, and I’ll unpack it below.

Ten days later the FAA proposed ordering airlines to inspect the seats on 453 US-registered 737 MAX jets. It had received a report that certain track-mounted seat assemblies were installed with the aft fitting shear plungers not lowered and not engaged in the seat tracks. In plain English, some seats might not be locked properly to the floor. In severe turbulence or a hard landing, the FAA said, they could injure people or block the aisle during an evacuation.

Read those two together and the second one looks like it demolishes the first. I read it the other way round. Somebody found badly installed seats, wrote it up, and within days the regulator moved to get hundreds of airplanes checked. One week after handing Boeing back a privilege, the same agency published a defect against Boeing’s best-selling airplane.

The part of my job passengers never see

Most of what keeps you safe is paperwork.

Every airplane I fly has a technical log, and every defect goes in it. Not the interesting ones. All of them. A flickering cabin light, a coffee maker that trips a breaker, a seatbelt buckle that won’t latch, a seat that shifts under my hand on the walkaround. Once it’s written down it belongs to the system, and that airplane doesn’t move until someone qualified either signs it off or defers it under the Minimum Equipment List, which spells out what’s allowed to be broken, for how long, and with what limitations. None of that depends on my judgment being sharp at 5 a.m., which is the entire point of it.

What the system can’t survive is a culture where writing things down costs you something.

That’s the real lesson of the Alaska Airlines door plug in January 2024, the panel that came off a MAX 9 at 16,000 feet with four bolts missing. When the NTSB finished in June 2025, the finding wasn’t about one careless mechanic. Boeing had failed to provide adequate training, guidance and oversight to prevent it, and the paperwork trail for that panel didn’t exist. Boeing then spent close to two years capped at 38 airplanes a month, because the FAA didn’t trust the factory to go faster than that.

Five things I check, and four you can check yourself

1. Find out which airplane you’re actually on. “A Boeing” covers a jet designed in the 1960s and one certified last year, and headlines almost never tell you which. Your booking email or the seat map in the airline app will name the exact variant: MAX 8, MAX 9, 787-9, 737-800. Look it up before you read another word about it. The MAX 8 entered service in 2017 and the MAX 9 in 2018, both went through a 20-month grounding, and both came back with mandated changes to the system behind the two crashes. Seven years of that kind of scrutiny isn’t nothing.

2. Read the fix, not the fear. When a story breaks, scroll past the headline until you find what’s being done about it. If there’s a specific part, a specific number of airplanes and a deadline, somebody has already found the problem, measured it and assigned it to people with tools. The seat story gives you all three: 453 jets, the aft fittings on track-mounted seats, inspections ordered. The stories that hold my attention are the ones where nobody can say yet what went wrong.

3. Who flies it matters more than who built it. The airline sets the maintenance standards, the training, and whether a tired first officer feels able to speak up. Here’s the one lookup I’d actually give you: IATA runs a public list called the IOSA registry, airlines that pass a recurring international safety audit. Type your airline’s name and “IOSA” into a search bar. Carriers on that registry ran 0.98 accidents per million flights last year. The ones not on it ran 2.55. Same airplanes, roughly two and a half times the rate.

4. If you’re reading about it, it already got caught. People get this one backwards. The seat problem reached your phone because somebody spotted it, wrote it up, and a regulator moved on it within days. That’s the machine working out loud. What hurt people on the Alaska door plug wasn’t a story in the news, it was a paperwork trail that didn’t exist.

5. The one I can’t hand you. Whether people inside get punished for reporting problems. It happens where neither of us can see it, and it’s the one I’d trade the other four for. In February an Air India crew wrote up a fuel control switch on a 787 that wouldn’t stay locked in RUN, and that airplane was out of service by the end of the day. Nobody had to be brave for that to happen. It’s just what the book says to do.

Every safety statistic in this article rests on people willing to write down inconvenient things.

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The five checks are the whole method, and they’ll get you through most headlines on your own.

Below the line I run all five against the three Boeing questions filling my inbox this week: the seat inspection order on 453 MAX jets, the FAA handing certification authority back to Boeing, and whether it’s safe to fly a 787 while the Air India investigation is still open. Plus a check I use when a story breaks about an airplane I’m scheduled to fly.

“I’m booked on a 737 MAX 8 next Tuesday. Should I move?”

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Pilot Nick — 8 min read — Black Box Series

You've almost certainly heard of the Miracle on the Hudson — the airliner that glided onto a river in New York with both engines gone. You've probably never heard of the one that pulled off something just as remarkable a year earlier, two miles from London Heathrow, with even less time to react.

On the 17th of January 2008, British Airways Flight 38 was seconds from an ordinary landing.

A Boeing 777 with 152 people aboard was on final approach to Heathrow — two miles out, 720 feet above the rooftops of west London closing out a routine ten-and-a-half-hour flight from Beijing.

Then both engines quietly stopped making power. No fire. No bang. No warning horn for what was happening. The autothrottle called for more thrust and got almost nothing back, and in the space of a few seconds a 150-tonne airliner became a glider — too low, too slow, sinking toward houses, a busy road, and the airport fence.

The crew had less than a minute to solve a problem that appeared in no checklist on the aircraft.

This is what actually happened, why it happened, what changed because of it, and the system the pilots used when the book ran out.

What everyone gets wrong about how pilots survive

Here’s the assumption most people carry: pilots stay alive in emergencies because there’s a checklist for everything.

Engine fire? There’s a page. Depressurization? There’s a page. Flip to the tab, run the drill, breathe. Most of the time, that’s exactly right. The checklist is one of the quiet miracles of aviation — it turns panic into a to-do list.

But a checklist can only cover the problems someone has already survived and written down. It’s a memory of other people’s disasters.

Flight 38 hit the one nobody had written down. And that’s the moment training actually earns its keep.

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Pilot Nick — 6 min read — Black Box Series

I saw the headline before I finished my coffee.

Passenger sucked out of Ryanair window. A photo of a hole where a window should be. A 61-year-old man in a hospital in Thessaloniki. And somewhere in a drawer, your own boarding pass for next week.

You read it twice. And a small, quiet voice asks the question you’ve been not-asking for years: what is actually holding that thing together?

Up in the flight deck, we’ve been rehearsing this exact morning for twenty-five years. Not the headline — the morning. The bang, the mist, the yellow masks, the turn back. Every six months, in a simulator, with someone marking us on it.

So let me tell you what happened over northern Greece at 06:20 this morning, from the seat with the controls in it.

What most people get wrong

When you read that a window failed and a man was pulled halfway out of it, your brain draws one conclusion: the aeroplane is fragile.

Here’s the thing. The aeroplane held.

Something broke a window. And then nothing else broke. The fuselage stayed intact. The wings stayed on. The remaining engine kept turning. The crew flew it home and landed on the runway they’d left an hour earlier.

The aeroplane was never in danger. The man in that seat was.

Those are two completely different sentences, and almost every article you’ll read today collapses them into one.

What actually happened

Ryanair FR1879, a Boeing 737-800 registered 9H-QEU, operated by Malta Air, lifted off runway 28 at Thessaloniki at 06:12 local, bound for Memmingen. Seventeen minutes late. A completely ordinary Friday.

Eight minutes later, climbing through FL150 — 15,000 feet, their maximum altitude that morning — there was a bang. Initial reports, and I stress the word initial, say an engine failed and debris from it struck the fuselage and destroyed a cabin window on the right-hand side.

The cabin depressurised. The masks dropped. A 61-year-old Serbian passenger at that window was pulled partially into the opening — head and shoulders before his wife and travelling companions hauled him back in. He is in hospital in Thessaloniki tonight with a neck injury and friction burns, and he is expected to be fine.

The crew declared an emergency and then did something that will confuse you if nobody explains it: they did not land immediately. They flew for another forty minutes and touched down at 07:08.

Two things in that paragraph deserve more than a news cycle. Start with the window.

Four panes, not one

The thing you lean your head against on a 737 isn’t a window. It’s four components stacked together.

The inner pane is the one you touch. Non-structural. Its entire job is to keep passengers, elbows and toddlers away from the panes that matter. It holds nothing back.

The airflow dampener sits behind it — the layer with the little hole everybody notices and nobody explains. It balances pressure between the panes and stops them fogging.

The middle pane is the fail-safe. Fully structural, certified to hold roughly 1.5 times normal cabin pressure on its own, with no help.

The outer pane is the one carrying the load right now, on every flight you’ve ever taken.

Read that again. The outer pane fails, the middle pane takes over — rated for half again more pressure than the cabin will ever ask of it. That’s this entire industry’s design philosophy in one small oval of acrylic: assume the primary structure fails, and make sure the backup doesn’t care.

For the cabin to lose pressure this morning, both structural panes had to go. Together. In the same instant.

That is an extraordinarily rare event. It’s why every pilot I know read this story twice.

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The first thing we do is nothing

There’s an old phrase in this trade: wind the clock. From the days when cockpits had mechanical clocks, and the instruction to a startled crew was, literally, wind the clock before you touch anything.

Give yourself eight seconds.

Because the aeroplane in that moment is not falling out of the sky. It’s flying — badly, loudly, alarmingly, but flying. An engine failure on a twin-engine airliner is a condition the machine is certified, tested and licensed to handle. Every pilot flying you today was examined on it inside the last six months.

The failure is almost never what hurts people. What hurts people is the ninety seconds afterwards.

Reach for the wrong switch. Shut down the good engine. Rush a heavy aeroplane at a runway because the cabin is screaming.

So we drill the order until it’s reflex. Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Fly it. Point it somewhere. Only then, talk.

The five steps

Step 1 — Fly the aeroplane. Someone puts hands on the controls and keeps the wings level. It’s said out loud: “I have control.” One person flies. One person deals with the problem. Nobody does both.

In real life: stabilise before you strategise.

Step 2 — Wind the clock. Almost nothing in an emergency requires an instant response. The exceptions are memorised and fit on one hand.

In real life: the urge to act fast is almost always the emotion talking.

Step 3 — Diagnose before you decide. The FR1879 crew had a bang, a decompression, engine indications and a cabin in chaos. Four problems — or one problem wearing four costumes. Shutting down the wrong engine has killed more people than engine failures ever have.

In real life: name the real problem before you fix the loud one.

Step 4 — Buy back margin. This comes in two halves, and the difference between them is the whole morning.

Half one is not optional. A cabin that loses pressure gets an immediate emergency descent below 10,000 feet, where the outside air alone keeps everyone conscious. The masks that dropped aren’t an endless supply — they’re chemical oxygen generators, good for around twelve minutes. That’s not a limitation. That’s the specification. Twelve minutes is comfortably more than any airliner needs to reach breathable air. The clock the masks start is a clock the aeroplane is built to beat.

Half two is a choice. Once level and breathing, the crew held, and burned fuel. A 737 eight minutes into a two-hour flight is heavy, and landing above maximum landing weight risks a hard, hot, brake-fire arrival on the runway you’re already going to need. So they traded forty minutes for a normal landing. With a hole in the aeroplane. On purpose.

The first half bought oxygen. The second bought margin. They are not the same decision, and this crew did not confuse them.

The masks are the most misunderstood object on the aeroplane, I wrote the whole story of what's actually inside them here: if you want to know more 👇🏻

Step 5 — Communicate last. Only once it was flying, understood and set up did they talk to ATC, to the cabin, to the company. Not because passengers don’t matter — because a pilot on the radio is a pilot not flying.

“Pilots aren’t calmer than you in an emergency. We’re just slower deliberately, systematically slower at exactly the moment everyone else speeds up.”

The framework above is the whole system. Using it while the masks are swinging in front of your face is another thing entirely.

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Pilot Nick — 9 min read

Two families walk into the same terminal for the same flight.

The first arrives three hours early — checked in already, passports backed up on paper, kids fed a real breakfast at the gate. The second cuts it to ninety minutes, hits a longer-than-expected line, and jogs the last hundred yards while a gate agent gives them the look.

Same airplane. Same departure time. One family starts vacation relaxed. The other starts it with an elevated heart rate.

The difference isn’t luck. It’s a handful of decisions made days before anyone reached the airport. After thirty years and 10,000-plus hours up front, here’s what I wish every passenger knew before flying this summer.

✈️ Before you book

Fly early. Your airplane has to physically exist at your airport before it can take you anywhere — a 6:15 a.m. departure usually slept at the gate overnight, clean of yesterday’s delays. Every flight after that first wave inherits the problems of the one before it.

More here 👇🏻

• The numbers back it up. Flights between 6 and 9 a.m. run on-time roughly 82-84%. Anything after 7 p.m. drops to the high 50s-low 60s. (Full hour-by-hour breakdown here.)

• Summer raises the stakes. Afternoon thunderstorms build almost on schedule — a morning departure beats the storm to the runway.

• Nonstop ≠ smartest. On a storm-prone route (Florida to the Northeast, say), one canceled nonstop leaves you with nothing. A connection through a busy hub gives you a backup flight.

• Pick your day. Tuesday and Wednesday run noticeably less congested than Friday or Sunday.

• Pick your date. The real crunch isn’t July 4th itself — it’s the Thursday/Friday before, the Sunday after, and the first two weeks of August. Push to late August and everything eases up together.

• Pad your connection. Treat the posted minimum connect time as a legal floor, not reality — add 30-45 minutes this summer.

• Flying late? Have a backup. Pick a flight with another same-day departure behind it on your route — that’s your rebooking safety net.

• The wing-seat thing is real physics, not folklore. An airplane pivots around its center of lift, roughly at the wing — like a seesaw. Sit up front or in back and you ride the far end of the seesaw; sit near the wing and you’re closest to the pivot. (More on my go-to seat here.) “Safer seating,” though, is mostly fiction — survivability isn’t meaningfully seat-dependent on modern aircraft. More here 👇🏻

🎒 Packing like a pilot

I’ve lived out of a carry-on for two decades. Three rules run the whole system: redundancy without bulk, multi-functionality, and accessibility. (The full system is here.)

• The 5-4-3-2-1 capsule — five underwear/sock sets, four shirts, three bottoms, two layers, one jacket, all wrinkle-resistant, quick-drying fabric — covers up to ten days.

• Bag matters: a soft-shell spinner flexes into tight overhead bins better than a hard case.

• Check a bag? Still pack one outfit and your toiletries in the carry-on — cheap insurance against a bag that misses your connection.

• AirTag every checked bag. Turns “somewhere in the system” into “in a specific building in Charlotte” — far more useful to tell an agent.

• Power banks: carry-on only, never checked. It’s a safety regulation, and several airlines now restrict in-cabin use too.

• Passport: never in a seatback pocket. More get left there than almost anywhere else on the plane.

• Slip-ons + easy-access liquids — standard 3-1-1 rules (3.4 oz, one quart bag) still apply at most checkpoints.

• Bag fees jumped hard this spring, and a couple of carriers now charge Basic Economy more than standard fare for a first bag. Prepay online for a small discount, and check whether a travel card you already carry includes a free checked bag.

More here 👇🏻

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Pilot Nick — 6 min read

You’re scrolling on your phone. A widebody drops toward a runway, rolls hard to the right, and its wingtip hangs a few feet above the concrete. Your stomach goes with it. You brace for the crash.

That was me on Thursday. And my honest first thought was:

This is fake.

I was so sure it was AI-generated that I almost scrolled past it. The wing was too low. The bank was too aggressive. The whole thing looked like one of those eerily smooth clips a machine spits out to farm outrage. I’d have bet money on it.

I lost that bet. It’s real. The lessor that owns the aircraft confirmed it. And the reason I was so certain it had to be fake is exactly why it’s so hard to watch now that I know it isn’t.

So let me walk you through what I saw and why a pilot’s brain refuses to accept it at first.

Why my gut screamed “fake” ✈️

1. Reason one: nobody does this in 2026.

Not because pilots have lost their sense of fun — a low pass, flown properly and briefed and approved, is a real and lovely thing. But a low pass like this one, uncoordinated and scraping the numbers? We know exactly how that movie ends, because we’ve watched it before.

In January 2008, Cathay Pacific’s chief 777 pilot, Ian Wilkinson, took delivery of a brand-new 777-300ER at Paine Field in Everett. After takeoff he turned back and buzzed the field, gear up, around 28 to 30 feet over the runway, with 50-odd people on board — including the airline’s chairman. Onlookers loved it. The video hit the internet. Within weeks he was fired and his first officer was suspended.

Seventeen years later, the playbook hasn’t changed. Camera, internet, regulator, consequences. Every professional pilot knows that story. Which is why my brain said: no one who knows that story would re-shoot it over a Texas resort.

2. Reason two: this wasn’t a slip. It was a decision.

In aviation we lean on something called just culture. The simple version: if you make an honest mistake a slip, a lapse, a judgment call that went sideways under pressure you’re not hung out to dry, because punishing honest error just teaches everyone to hide it. We protect the people who own up. That’s how the whole safety system keeps learning.

But just culture has a hard edge. It protects mistakes. It does not protect reckless, deliberate acts. And this was deliberate. The jet wasn’t even supposed to be there — it left its planned route to detour over the owner’s home field and set this up on purpose. You don’t accidentally arrive at zero feet in a steep bank. You choose it.

3. Reason three: you know the world is watching.

This is the part that truly breaks a pilot’s logic. You don’t need to imagine the camera anymore. In 2026 you can assume one is rolling, always. You know the clip goes viral by dinner. You know the FAA opens a file. You know your certificates — your career, your livelihood are suddenly on a regulator’s desk. The math never closes. The upside is fifteen seconds of applause. The downside is everything. So why? That’s the question I still can’t answer.

The detail that made no sense to me: clean config

Here’s what turned my disbelief into something closer to anger.

The jet was clean no flaps, gear up. To a non-pilot that sounds like a footnote. To me it’s the whole story.

A safe low pass is basically a planned go-around. You’d typically be configured — some flap, often the gear down — which lets you fly slower with a fat margin above the stall, engines spooled and ready, the airplane stable and predictable. That’s the version where, if something twitches, you have room.

Clean is the opposite. No flaps means the wing makes less lift at a given speed, so your safe minimum speed is higher and your cushion gets thinner the slower you go. Now roll that into a steep bank a few feet off the ground. Banking raises the speed at which the wing quits flying and tips your lift away from holding you up. And on a jet with a wingspan over 200 feet, the instant you roll toward the runway, the low wingtip is suddenly far closer to the ground than the wheels ever were.

Clean and slick is the configuration you pick if you want to look fast and dramatic. It is also the one that leaves you the least room when anything goes wrong — a gust, a patch of your own wake, a half-second of sink, a touch too much bank. There was no margin in that picture. None.

And history rhymes here too: in the Cathay case, the single detail that turned what might’ve passed for a normal missed approach into a fireable stunt was the gear being up. Same tell. Seventeen years apart.

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The facts, straight

Let me separate what happened from the noise online.

The aircraft is a 17-year-old Boeing 777-200LR, registration N705DN — a former Delta jet from 2009, retired around 2020. It was bought by Jetran, a Texas lessor, and converted into a freighter (the 777-200LRMF) by Mammoth Freighters.

It’s the first of five bound for Qatar Airways Cargo, which is the launch customer for the type. That’s why it wears Qatar’s livery.

On Wednesday, June 24, it was on a ferry flight from Grissom Aeroplex in Indiana to Fort Worth Alliance in Texas. It detoured to Horseshoe Bay Resort Jet Center — Jetran’s home base, a field with a 6,000-foot runway rated for aircraft up to regional jets, not widebodies — and made the pass. Here’s the part worth slowing down on. The lowest altitude FlightRadar24’s receivers recorded was 950 feet — which sounds survivable until you understand what that number is. ADS-B reports barometric altitude above sea level at standard pressure. Correct it for the actual air pressure that day (1018 hPa) and the field’s elevation (1,080 feet), and the jet was sitting between 0 and 25 feet above the ground. Runway level. The wingtip came within feet of the concrete in the bank.

The FAA is looking into it for careless or reckless operation and minimum-altitude rules. That can cost a pilot their certificates.

And the most important correction of all, because the comments got it wrong for two days straight:

This is not Qatar Airways. The plane wears the paint, but the title hasn’t transferred. Jetran still owns it. No Qatar pilots were on board. Jetran said plainly that the flight didn’t reflect operational standards, that the aircraft isn’t owned, operated, or registered by Qatar, and that it expects a full investigation and accountability. Blame the paint if you want — but blame the right people.

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What I keep coming back to

I wanted it to be fake. Fake is harmless. Fake is a machine showing off.

Real means two qualified people, in a working flight deck, decided the picture was worth the risk — to themselves, to a $100-million-plus airframe, and to anyone who happened to be near that runway.

The wing didn’t touch. This time.

That’s the only line between a viral clip and a smoking hole, and it’s the thinnest line I’ve seen all year. We don’t fly to the edge of that line for applause. We fly to keep a wide, boring, beautiful margin between us and it — every single time.

Fly Safe, Pilot Nick

Pilot Nick — 5 min read

The headline was built to make your stomach drop.

A Qantas jet. Halfway from London to Perth. Not enough fuel to finish.

Forced down in a mining town in the middle of the Australian outback.

If you’ve got a flight booked, that’s the exact sentence your brain files under see, I knew it.

Here’s the part the headline skipped: from inside the cockpit, this was a good day.

Let me show you why and why this week, of all weeks, the timing is almost too perfect.

What actually happened

QF10, a Boeing 787-9, left London on one of the longest passenger routes on Earth — roughly 17 hours nonstop to Perth on June 22, 2026.

Somewhere over the Indian Ocean, the wind turned. Headwinds stronger than forecast. (A headwind is just air pushing back at you; fight it for hours and you burn more fuel to cover the same distance.)

So the crew ran the numbers, reached a calm conclusion, and set the 787 down at Karratha a regional airport about 1,500 km north of Perth. One hour on the ground, top up the tanks, on to Perth.

No emergency. No danger. A late arrival and a refuel. That’s the entire story.

Fun fact: Karratha mostly serves the fly-in, fly-out crews of the region’s iron-ore mines. It had only been cleared to handle big international jets a few weeks before QF10 came knocking. Talk about timing.

Why pilots don’t panic about fuel

Here’s the thing most passengers never hear.

A pilot is almost never surprised by fuel. It’s the most predictable thing on the airplane before the engines even start, we know roughly to the kilo what we’ll have at every point along the route.

The fuel isn’t the wild card. The wind is.

So we don't plan for the wind we want. We plan for the wind that ruins the day and we carry the fuel for it in named layers.

On top of the fuel to actually get there, we add contingency fuel usually around 5% of the trip set aside for exactly this: a headwind stronger than forecast, or not getting the cruising altitude we asked for and burning more down low. Then comes alternate fuel: enough to fly to a backup airport if we can’t land at the destination. And underneath all of it sits the final reserve typically 30 minutes of flying we are never, ever allowed to touch.

Layers on layers. That’s the whole game.

There’s something else hidden in that flight plan, too. Over a long ocean crossing, it already names the nearest place to land at every single point along the way. Karratha wasn’t a frantic search at 38,000 feet. It was on the list the whole time, quietly waiting to be useful.

And we usually see it coming a long way off. We’re running fuel checks for the entire flight, so a developing shortfall shows up early often hours before it actually matters. That’s plenty of time to get on the radio to our operations team on the ground and set up the fuel stop calmly, in advance. By the time a jet like QF10 touches down to refuel, the people on the ground have been expecting it for hours.

So “ran low on fuel” is the scary translation. The cockpit translation is dull: the wind was worse than forecast, so we used a backup we’d written before we ever left London.

Dull is the goal. Dull is the entire job.

Now here’s why this week is wild

That little outback detour landed just days after Qantas unveiled the most ambitious flight in its 105-year history.

It’s called Project Sunrise. From October 2027, Qantas plans to fly Sydney to London nonstop — up to 22 hours in the air, the longest scheduled passenger flight the world has ever seen.

To pull it off, Airbus built them a special jet: the A350-1000ULR. Engineers bolted in an extra 20,000-litre fuel tank and stretched its range by around 1,000 nautical miles — far enough to make a route that used to be physically impossible.

And here’s the trade-off that tells you everything. This jet will carry just 238 passengers, instead of the 400-or-so a standard A350 could hold. Qantas gave up real, revenue-paying seats to make room for fuel — and for space to stretch out on a flight that lasts nearly a full day.

That’s the razor’s edge of ultra-long-haul. The longer the flight, the more every kilo of fuel and every gust of wind matters.

Which is exactly why a stronger-than-forecast headwind nudged a 787 into Karratha this week and exactly why Qantas is engineering so much margin into the 2027 jet. This week was a tiny, accidental preview of the whole challenge.

If the engineering grabs you, I took the full tour a few weeks back — four pilots, choreographed sleep in a hidden crew bunk above the cabin, and an 80-hour test programme aimed almost entirely at that new fuel tank — in 22 Hours. 4 Pilots. 10,573 Miles. Inside the Longest Flight in History. If today’s fuel story pulled you in, that one’s the full flight-deck breakdown.👇🏻

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Fun fact: The name Project Sunrise is a nod to the 1940s, when Qantas flying boats crossed the Indian Ocean in around 33 hours so long that passengers watched the sun rise twice on a single flight. The new jet is faster. The spirit is identical: respect the distance, plan for the long haul.

What this should actually tell you

If flying makes you nervous: a fuel diversion isn’t the system breaking. It is the system. The plane that lands early to top up is being flown by people who would always rather be an hour late than a drop short.

If you fly often: this is the new normal at the edge of the map. The longer the route, the bigger a vote the wind gets and the more an unscheduled stop becomes a sensible footnote instead of a scare.

And if you just love airplanes: you’re watching the limits of flight get pushed in real time. A mining-town runway, an extra fuel tank, and a 22-hour leap — all in the same week.

The three numbers I’d be watching on QF10 and the one I’d never let drop…

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Pilot Nick · 4 min read

Summer flying is crowded, tight, and easy to get wrong this year. So here’s the short version — 28 years at the front of the airplane, distilled into the things I’d actually tell you at the gate.

A smooth trip isn’t luck. It’s set up on the ground, before you leave. Here’s how.

1. Take the first flight of the day. Delays compound as the day goes on — your evening flight is hostage to every problem the airplane had since breakfast. Mornings get cancelled less and fly through the smoothest air. Best single choice you can make.

More on why the worst-looking departure is secretly the smartest:

2. Go nonstop or leave real room. A nonstop can’t misconnect. If you must connect, give yourself 90+ minutes at a big hub in summer. The $40 you save on a tight layover is a loan, and the interest is your vacation.

3. Book in the window. Roughly 1–3 months out for domestic, 2–8 for international. Fly early in the week — it’s usually cheaper than weekends. Set a fare alert and let the price come to you instead of refreshing tabs at midnight.

4. Pick your seat on purpose. Over the wing if turbulence rattles you — it’s the steadiest part of the airplane. Aisle, forward of the wing, if you want a fast exit and first crack at rebooking. Skip the very back; it moves the most.

The exact seat I tell every white-knuckle flyer to book:

5. Skip the lines before you reach them. If you don’t have TSA PreCheck, Global Entry, or CLEAR, this is the summer to get them. And whatever you do — arrive earlier than feels necessary. Rushing is rocket fuel for stress, and summer security is slow. The shortcut most passengers walk right past:

6. Pack light and stay powered. Carry-on only means you never wait at a belt and never lose a bag. Bring a charged battery pack every delay drains your phone exactly when you need it. Screenshot your boarding pass in case the terminal Wi-Fi quits. Ten days, one carry-on — here's exactly how I do it:

7. Track the airplane, not just the flight. Turn on your airline app's push notifications — you'll often know about a delay or gate change before the agent announces it, and the first person to act gets the good seat on the next flight. The pro move: open Flightradar24 and find your inbound aircraft, the plane that becomes your flight. If it hasn't left its last city yet, your "on time" departure isn't. Apps like Flighty go further, predicting delays and flagging aircraft swaps before the airline says a word.

8. Nervous flyer? Tell the crew. We’re trained for it and genuinely glad to help. Then: slow your exhale longer than your inhale, keep your eyes on the horizon, and skip the second coffee — caffeine mimics the exact racing-heart feeling your brain reads as fear. The bumps are uncomfortable, not dangerous.

9. Can’t-miss trip? Fly in the day before. A wedding, a cruise, a flight you absolutely cannot miss is not a same-day-arrival trip in summer. The extra hotel night is the cheapest insurance you’ll ever buy.

That’s the whole list. Do the unglamorous work on the ground, and the flight becomes what it almost always is — ordinary, and over before you know it.

Before you go ✈️

Quick one for you — the Fly Calm Masterclass is the thing paid readers ask me about most, and summer is when it earns its keep. Maybe you’re the nervous flyer in tip #8, or maybe it’s your partner, your parent, or your kid who white-knuckles every takeoff.

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Fly Safe, Pilot Nick

Pilot Nick - 6 min read

You probably saw it yesterday. The headline writes itself:

If you’re someone who already grips the armrest at takeoff, your stomach just went through the floor. The one thing you assumed was a given that the person in the left seat is allowed to be there suddenly feels like a question.

So take a breath.

I want to walk you through this one the way I’d brief it to my own crew. Because the headline and the reality are two very different aircraft.

Here’s the part I’ll say plainly before anything else: the man could fly the plane. That was never the allegation.

What actually happened

On Tuesday, Peel Regional Police announced the results of an investigation they’d named Project Icarus. They allege that a former Air Canada captain named in the coverage as Geoffrey Wall, now retired captained more than 900 domestic and international flights between 2009 and 2025 without holding the licence Canadian rules require for the job.

He’s facing seven criminal charges, including fraud, forgery and public mischief. Transport Canada has also levied a monetary penalty.

I’m going to keep using the word allegedly, because that’s what these are: allegations. Nothing here has been proven in court, and a charge is not a conviction. But the documented facts of the licensing gap are not really in dispute even Air Canada has acknowledged it.

So let’s talk about what that gap actually is. Because “without a licence” is doing an enormous amount of work in that headline, and it does not mean what you think.

“Without a licence” doesn’t mean what you think

There isn’t one pilot’s licence. There’s a ladder of them.

To fly passengers for an airline, you build up through a series of certifications, each one a higher bar than the last. The big two that matter here:

• A Commercial Pilot Licence (CPL) — this lets you fly professionally and get paid for it. It takes serious training, exams, and a flight test.

• An Airline Transport Pilot Licence (ATPL) — the top rung. In Canada, this is the licence a captain of a large airline aircraft is required to hold. You earn it mainly by clearing a battery of additional written exams — air law, meteorology, navigation, flight planning — on top of an experience requirement of well over a thousand hours.

Here’s the crux of the case. Police and Air Canada both say the accused held a valid Commercial Pilot Licence and was fully trained. What he allegedly lacked was the ATPL — the captain-level credential. The alleged crime isn’t that an untrained stranger wandered into the cockpit. It’s that the paperwork certifying he’d cleared that top rung was, police allege, fraudulent.

That’s a meaningful difference. “Unqualified to fly” and “missing a specific certification while demonstrably able to fly” are not the same sentence even though the headline blurs them into one.

The part that should reassure you

Now the most reassuring part of this whole story, the one almost no headline will mention.

In Canada, an airline pilot’s competence isn’t checked once, at licensing, and then trusted forever. It’s checked relentlessly, for your entire flying career.

Every six months, I’m back in a simulator being put through my worst day, engine failures, fires, failures stacked on failures and graded on it. Every twelve months, a certified check pilot rides in the cockpit on a real flight and watches everything I do. Air Canada has confirmed its pilots go through exactly this: recurrent training every six months, plus an annual flight check with a Transport Canada check pilot.

By the airline’s own account, this captain was repeatedly tested in the simulator and in the actual aircraft and met or exceeded the standard, year after year.

I’ve sat through dozens of these checks. I can tell you there is no faking your way through them. A check pilot watching you fly an approach in a crosswind, or handle an engine failure at the worst possible moment, sees through anything in about ninety seconds. Whatever the paperwork said, the flying was independently graded by the regulator over and over again.

So when the headline implies that 900 flights’ worth of passengers were at the mercy of someone who couldn’t do the job — the evidence we have points the other way. The flying was watched. Closely. The whole time.

These are the layers that were quietly protecting you on every one of those flights:

1. A fully qualified first officer in the other seat, trained to take over instantly.

2. Standard operating procedures that mean any two qualified pilots can fly together safely, even as strangers.

3. Recurrent simulator checks every six months, grading each pilot on emergencies you’ll thankfully never see.

4. An annual line check with a regulator’s check pilot riding along on a real flight.

5. The aircraft itself built with layers of redundancy so that no single point, human or mechanical, is the only thing keeping you in the air.

A licence is one layer. This story is about that one layer being allegedly faked. Every other layer was doing its job.

So if he could clearly fly the plane, why does the missing licence matter at all?

That’s the part worth paying attention to. And it’s where this story stops being reassuring and starts being important.

The five layers above are the whole reassurance and they’re real. But knowing he could fly the plane and understanding why the missing licence still matters are two very different things.

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