From The Pilots Seat - MIG29 To The Edge Of Space and Gravitational Stress

Skiathos, the Second St Maarten! Low Landings and Jetblasts - A Plane Spotting Movie

The Second St Maarten! Lower Landings near the beach but with smaller jets.

Ryanair Flight 8347

European airline Ryanair holds passengers on plane for hours with no food or water.

Painted planes

Maho Beach St Maarten - Extreme take-off and landing!

Air shows 2013

In the effort to celebrate and marvel at our ability to fly and see new technological advances, air shows are held all over the world every year. Attendees get the chance to witness complex aerobatic performances and sometimes up-close access to the aircraft on the ground.


A Romanian boy plays with his toy plane while Jurgis Kairys, a Lithuanian aerobatic pilot and aeronautical engineer, performs a freestyle aerobatic maneuver with his modified Sukhoi SU 31, at the Bucharest International Air Show 2013, at Baneasa airport, in Bucharest, Romania, on July 27. (Robert Ghement/European Pressphoto Agency)

Strange airplanes you'll never see!

Airbus A380 Contrail as seen from KLM Cockpit Boeing B747-400

A huge contrail from an Airbus A380 as seen from cockpit of a Boeing B747 above the South China Sea. We were warned by a HongKong air traffic controller. That's why we were able to film this event. Apologies for shaky camera movements at the end. The Airbus was going too fast to be able to follow it smoothly.

NOSE GEAR CAMERA

landing on ice in Antarctica

Aircraft Pictures.... like never before!

10 Terrifying Airport Runways

Check out some of the scariest takeoff and touchdown spots around the world

White-knuckle travelers beware: The airports below are notorious for their tricky, and oftentimes terrifying, runways. Whether the shorter-than-average landing strips end with an abrupt drop-off or mountainous terrain makes for a twisting flight path, getting to and from these airports takes some serious know-how. Fasten your seatbelts and read on to learn about the 10 most frightening runways out there.
Paro Airport, Bhutan

Nestled in a valley below the Himalayan Mountains, Bhutan's Paro Airport is notoriously frightening to fly into. In addition to navigating the area's 16,000-foot-high jagged peaks, pilots also must contend with forceful winds that gust around the mountains. But if you find yourself on a flight to Paro, rest assured that you're in good hands: Only eight pilots in the world are qualified to make the landing.

Toncontìn Airport, Honduras

A variety of factors, including a short runway, proximity to mountainous terrain and a tricky approach, make Honduras's Toncontìn Airport infamously challenging to fly into. In 2008, after the crash of a TACA airlines flight at the airport, all international flights were temporarily diverted to Soto Cano Air Base, and Toncontìn was reserved solely for domestic flights and smaller aircrafts.
Kai Tak, Hong Kong, China

It's no longer open, but Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong just might take the cake for the most hair-raising airport ever. It was located in the center of Kowloon, Hong Kong, and pilots were forced to make a sharp turn and fly between buildings to strategically place their jets on the runway—which ended with a drop into the ocean. Much to adrenaline junkies' dismay, runway misses and safety reviews caused the airport to close in 1998.
Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport, Saba, Netherlands Antilles

On the northeast corner of Saba—the smallest of the Caribbean's Antilles islands—sits the tiny airstrip at Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport. Trade winds and a mountainous terrain make it necessary to navigate the territory carefully, or else risk overshooting the 1,300-foot-long runway and ending up in the vast sea below.
Barra Airport, Scotland

Tarmac? What tarmac? At Scotland's Barra Airport, located on Traigh Mhor beach, planes land right on the sand. When the tide comes in daily, the airport is washed away. And when the sun starts to set, a few cars' headlights in a nearby parking lot provide illumination, since the airport features no artificial light. Sunbathers must watch out: When the windsock is flying, the airport is active, and they need to take their towels elsewhere.
Courchevel Airport, France

Since it's part of the French Alps' Les Trois Vallées ski resort, it's no surprise that Courchevel Airport's slanted, snow-flanked runway resembles a ski slope, complete with a vertical drop at the end. Pair the undulating landing strip with the region's snow, ice and blustery winds, and it's easy to see why this small airport has made our list.
Tioman Island, Malaysia

Getting to gorgeous, tropical Tioman Island isn't for the faint of heart: The airport's short runway not only ends in an abrupt drop off a cliff's edge, but pilots are forced to head straight for the mountains before making a sharp 90-degree turn to line the aircraft up directly with the landing strip.
LaGuardia Airport, New York

Thanks to congested airspace—nearby John F. Kennedy and Newark Airports also have competing traffic—as well as runways that jut out into the water, New York's LaGuardia airport is no piece-of-cake landing spot. One runway's approach requires pilots to make a steep, low-altitude turn frighteningly close to the ground.
McMurdo Station Airport, Antarctica

When aircrafts carrying researchers or supplies touch down in Antarctica's McMurdo Station, they do so upon ice, not tarmac. Though the ground's temperature is carefully monitored—if it's too warm the ice may not support heavy aircrafts—it can be a bit unnerving to land on sheets of frozen water. But according to some pilots, when conditions are good, touching down on the frozen tundra is smoother than landing at a regular airport.
Tenzing-Hillary Airport, Nepal

Named for two climbers who conquered Mount Everest, Nepal's Tenzing-Hillary Airport is an adventure in and of itself. It features one of the steepest uphill runways in the world, capped off with a fence to prevent planes from dropping off the edge of a cliff. And during takeoff, planes head downhill, where the runway ends and delivers aircrafts into a deep valley, where they hopefully gain enough momentum to climb skyward again.

 

Kid Moxie - Tsunami

Beach you don't see this every day

Airplane Landing On The Beach

Crazy Landing

Boeing-747 Insane Takeoff!!

A2 hypersonic airplane

Development

The LAPCAT A2 concept in the upper atmosphere

The vehicle is intended to have about 20,000 kilometres (12,000 mi) range and good subsonic and supersonic fuel efficiency, thus avoiding the problems inherent in earlier supersonic aircraft. The top speed is projected to be Mach 5+. It calls for the use of liquid hydrogen as a fuel, which has twice thespecific energy of kerosene, and can be used to cool the vehicle and the air entering the engines via a precooler.

The developers say it would be able to fly from Brussels to Sydney in about 4.6 hours; compared to around a complete day of travel with normal aircraft. The cost of a ticket is intended to be roughly business class level.^[1]

“	Our work shows that it is possible technically; now it's up to the world to decide if it wants it.	”
	— Alan Bond, managing director of Reaction Engines Limited

Design

Capabilities

Alan Bond told The Guardian newspaper:^[2]

“

The A2 is designed to leave Brussels International Airport, fly quietly and subsonically out into the north Atlantic at Mach 0.9 before reaching Mach 5 across the North Pole and heading over the Pacific to Australia.

”

Another advantage of the design is that, while the 143 metre-long A2 is much bigger than conventional jets, it would be lighter than a Boeing 747 and could take off and land on current airport runways.

However, the A2 design does not have windows. The heat generated by traveling so quickly makes it difficult to install windows that are not too heavy. One solution Reaction Engines has proposed is to install flat panel displays, showing images of the scene outside.

Engines

The Scimitar engines use related technology to the company's earlier SABRE an engine which is intended for space launch, but here adapted for very long distance, very high speed travel.

Normally, as air enters a jet engine, it is compressed by the inlet, and thus heats up. This means that high speed engines need to be made of technologies and materials that can survive extremely hightemperatures. In practice, this inevitably makes the engines heavier and also reduces the amount of fuel that can be burnt to avoid melting the gas turbine section of the engine, which in turn reduces thrust at high speed.

The key design feature for the Scimitar engines is the precooler, which is a heat exchanger that transfers the heat from the incoming air into the hydrogen fuel. This greatly cools the air, which allows the engines to burn more fuel even at very high speed, and allows the engines to be made of lighter, but more heat susceptible, materials such as light alloys.

The rest of the engine is described as having high-bypass (4:1^[3]) turbofan engine features to give it good efficiency and subsonic (quiet) exhaust velocity at low speeds. Unlike SABRE the A2's engine would not have rocket engine features.

Specifications

• Range: 20,000 kilometres (12,000 mi)
• Length: 143 metres (469 ft)
• Fuel: Liquid hydrogen
• Passengers: 300 (Single Class)
• Cruising speed: Mach 5
• Specific fuel consumption: 0.86 lbf/lb·h at Mach 5 (40,900 m/s^[4] - 4,170 seconds), 0.375 lbf/lb·h at Mach 0.9 (96,000 m/s^[4] - 9,600 seconds)
• Lift to drag ratio: 11.0 at 5.9 km, Mach 0.9, 5.9 at 25 km Mach 5^[5]
• Noise: 101 dBa at 450m lateral^[5]

A2 2000 Ground
Takeoff 1
Inflight underneath
25km up
a2 heating
A380 compared
size comparison
With A380 Front
With A380 Side
With A380 Top