Airline travel, as enthusiasts know and passengers accept unthinkingly, is the safest means of transportation in the history of mankind. But almost every type of aircraft has met with accidents; even the legendary Boeing 747 was involved in many, especially during its early years. To find a type that has…

Call it the DC-3, C-47, Dakota, Gooney Bird, Old Fatso or simply Doug. Nakajima of Japan produced it under license as the L2D - code-named ‘Tabby’ by the Allies. Even the Soviets built them and rather prosaically, called it the Passazhirskiy Samolyot -84. It flew on every continent and with…

Propliners Guest Column by Capt. G.A. Fernando — Evacuation flights and a near miss This story dates from August 1977. It was 13 months before Sri Lanka’s ‘long war’ effectively began with the country’s first experience of aviation terrorism, when a bomb destroyed one of Air Ceylon’s two Hawker Siddeley (Avro) HS 748 aircraft. A landmark election held just a few weeks earlier in…

Kansas The state of Kansas is located in the geographic centre of mainland USA. In the heart of the ‘Great Plains’ and bordered on the northeast by the Missouri River, Kansas is known for many things: as the ‘breadbasket’ of the USA, growing more wheat than any other state; location of…

Flying the DC-3/C47 with the SAAF by John Cawood My good friend and former colleague John Cawood, who was born in South Africa, enlisted in the South African Air Force (SAAF) in 1982. John flew the Douglas DC-3 Dakota for the SAAF’s 35 Squadron during the last year of his service. The Dakotas, mainly military surplus C-47s, were the…

Electric power holds promise of a new era Propeller-driven aircraft, the focus of this blog, have been roaring their way across the skies for more than a hundred years. Elegant, useful and amazing pieces of engineering they might be, but it has to be admitted that they are also noisy and spew pollutants wherever they fly. But help…

Propliners guest column continues… — It was the summer of 1971and a war was brewing in South Asia. Pakistan had been created as a Muslim majority country when British India gained independence in 1947, but it was a bifurcated state. East and West Pakistan, though one country, was geographically divided with a large swath of…

Propliner Guest column — The ‘Great Game’ popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim, was the complicated tussle for control played out on the ‘roof of the world’, where the Karakoram, Hindu Kush and Himalayan mountain ranges meet in northern India, and the British Empire’s border with Afghanistan and Tibet was demarcated…

BRICS and aviation Jim O’Neill, chief economist of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that is the epitome of capitalism (and some would say corruption), coined the phrase ‘BRIC’ in 2001 to denote the four emerging economies that would reshape the world’s economy. …