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Lightning Strikes

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  The weather here in San Antonio this week is awful. Today I had to cut short my swim in the outdoor pool as thunder and lightning were directly overhead. Not wanting to be a victim of a lightning strike I sought the sanctuary of the pool-house. Just what options are available to airliners when thunderstorms are present? In March 2023 a Lufthansa flight from Austin to Frankfurt had to divert to Dulles after it was struck by lightning with several passengers requiring medical treatment (Tedder, 2023). The FAA instructs pilots to avoid all thunderstorms and never go closer than 5 miles to any visible storm (FAA, 2008). The reason for this is a thunderstorm is an uncontrolled heat engine that may produce any or all of the most violent weather hazards a pilot can encounter, hail, ice, turbulence to name a few. Airliners can usually fly above thunderstorms. If this is not possible then they will be diverted around the bad weather. Should the thunderstorm be in the vicinity of an airp...
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Drones and Airport Security Take 2

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  The International Air Transport Association lists the four greatest threats to aviation security as insider threat (airport/airline employees carrying out an attack), aviation cybersecurity (hacking into the systems that control day to day operations to cause disruption), security on the ground (having the right amount in the right place), and conflict zones (unauthorized incursions into the airport airspace) (Smith, 2018). You may be surprised to find terrorism missing from this list, but that is because it has aspects in all these four. Fig 1. Police drone causes Cessna damage (Robinson, 2023)   December 2019 saw London’s Gatwick airport cancel hundreds of flights and divert many more inbound due to sightings of two drones being flown close to the airport’s perimeter (McTegg, Fayez, Simmons, Gharineiat, 2022). As the ownership of drones has increased in recent years and there not being a registration requirement with authorities (so long as you operate unde...
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Drones and Airport Security

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The International Air Transport Association lists the four greatest threats to aviation security as insider threat (airport/airline employees carrying out an attack), aviation cybersecurity (hacking into the systems that control day to day operations to cause disruption), security on the ground (having the right amount in the right place), and conflict zones (unauthorized incursions into the airport airspace) (Smith, 2018). You may be surprised to find terrorism missing from this list, but that is because it has aspects in all these four.     December 2019 saw London’s Gatwick airport cancel hundreds of flights and divert many more inbound due to sightings of two drones being flown close to the airport’s perimeter (McTegg, Fayez, Simmons, Gharineiat, 2022). As the ownership of drones has increased in recent years and there not being a registration requirement with authorities (so long as you operate under USC 44809), the potential of a repeat of Gatwick at airports anywher...
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Can Air Travel Be Green?

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If David Attenborough's address to world leaders at the 2018 UN climate summit is to be believed then we are "facing a man-made disaster of global scale" (Carrington, 2018). Climate change is a threat to everyone on the planet and we are at a tipping point with time running out to attempt to change the course we are on. Automobile companies are abandoning diesel vehicles and sales of electric "green" vehicles are rising exponentially year on year. Countries are investing more and more into renewable sources of energy with solar and wind farms becoming more prominent features on the horizons. What actions are being taken by our airline industries to ensure that moving forward air travel is more ethically appealing?     A typical flight from London Heathrow to New York's JFK emits around 1.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide (Timperley, 2021). This is roughly one third of the average person's yearly emissions. Burning fossil fuels is bad for the environment, but ...
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