British Airways and Air France mutually retired the Concorde supersonic jet in 2003. Both companies cited rising maintenance costs as being the reason, which in turn were compounded by falling demand after the Paris crash in 2000 and a general downturn in civil aviation after 9/11. Now, American and
(A version of this post, as written by me, first appeared in The Hindu science blog, The Copernican, on March 16, 2014.) It’s likely any of you knew many of or all the following, but these are things I became aware of from reading news items and analyses of
Air Crash Investigation
Airplanes are one of our largest modes of transportation in terms of physical size. With the exception of ships, airplanes have the highest carrying capacity, are quite environmentally disruptive while in operation, and are equipped with some of the most sophisticated positional tracking technologies. Yet, one still went missing last
