Aviation
Business
19 rabbit holes · 10 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Where do old planes go?
- Why did airlines stop buying the biggest passenger jet ever built?
- Why is Chicago's airport code ORD?
- Why do two people on the same flight pay wildly different prices?
Rabbit holes
- where airliners go when they retire
Dry air, alkaline soil, no rust. Hundreds of planes just sitting in rows in the Arizona desert. Some come back into service, some get parted out.
Dev Malhotra · 6 sources
- the first transatlantic flight wasn't Lindbergh
Alcock and Brown did it nonstop in 1919, eight years earlier. Lindbergh was the first solo. Also the NC-4 crossed in stages a few weeks before them. Pub trivia ammunition.
Mateo González · 5 sources
- navigators used to shoot the stars through a bubble in the roof of the plane
Saw a photo of a B-29 with a little glass dome on top and had to know what it was for. Ended up back at Harrison's clocks, as one does.
Moira Gallagher · 6 sources
- flights to Asia go over Alaska because the map is lying
Assumed it was an airspace thing. It's just that a straight line on a flat map isn't the shortest path on a sphere.
Alistair Grant · 5 sources
- Concorde's tiny windows
Small windows limit how fast the cabin depressurizes if one fails at 60,000 ft. Passengers could see the curvature of the earth out of them. Feels like a future we sort of abandoned.
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- the 747 has a hump because everyone thought it would be obsolete
Short version: in the 60s everyone assumed supersonic jets would take over passenger travel, so the 747 was designed to end up as a freighter. Cockpit goes upstairs so the whole nose can swing open for cargo.
Alistair Grant · 5 sources
- why planes dump fuel (and when they can't)
Plenty of airliners can't dump fuel at all, so in an emergency they either circle to burn it off or do an overweight landing and get inspected afterwards.
Alistair Grant · 4 sources
- American Airlines once sold unlimited first class for life
In 1981 American needed cash, so it sold lifetime unlimited passes for $250,000. A few buyers flew thousands of flights and the airline eventually decided it was losing a lot of money and started revoking passes.
Alistair Grant · 5 sources
- why the A380 flopped
Gabriel Souza · 6 sources
- a man lived in Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle for 18 years
From 1988 to 2006 he lived in the departure lounge after being stranded without valid documents, and stayed even after he was granted residency. His story inspired The Terminal. He went back to the airport in 2022 and died there two months later.
Fern Achterberg · 5 sources
- a 1983 paper called Ironies of Automation describes every problem with AI agents
Short paper, very readable, by Lisanne Bainbridge. The core irony: you automate the easy parts, leave the human to watch, and then expect them to take over in exactly the hardest situations, after they've lost practice and context.
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- The Gimli Glider: a 767 that ran out of fuel because of a units mistake
The captain happened to be an experienced glider pilot, and the first officer happened to have served at Gimli. Neither of those things should have been necessary.
Carlos Mendoza · 5 sources
- The airport code rabbit hole
ORD, YYZ, MCO, MSY. Every weird code is a little fossil of an older name or a radio station identifier.
Mateo González · 5 sources
- does airplane mode actually matter
Apparently the real reason is a pilot hearing that GSM buzz in their headset, plus a hundred phones screaming for cell towers at altitude. Not that the plane falls out of the sky.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- the An-225, the biggest plane ever, was built to carry a space shuttle
Only one was ever completed. Built to piggyback the Buran shuttle, then spent decades hauling oversized cargo. Destroyed at Hostomel in 2022.
Zoë Tran · 4 sources
- Kai Tak's checkerboard approach
747s doing a 47 degree turn at low altitude right over apartment buildings, aiming at a literal checkerboard painted on a hill. Old videos are unreal.
Kate Lindqvist · 4 sources
- why airplane bathrooms have ashtrays
Because someone will still smoke in there, and it's much safer for them to put it out in the ashtray than the bin. Required by regulation even though smoking is banned.
Yuki Tanabe · 3 sources
- why cockpits went from three pilots to two
The flight engineer job got automated away, and CRM came out of crashes where a crew noticed a problem but nobody felt able to tell the captain.
Dev Malhotra · 5 sources
- how American Airlines beat People Express with software
After deregulation, People Express sold cheap no-frills fares and grew like crazy. American's answer was a yield management system that could match those fares on just enough seats to fill the plane while still selling the rest at full price. People Express's founder later said they'd been profitable until American came after them with those fares.
Dev Malhotra · 6 sources