Airports that handle passenger planes operated by companies such as Southwest, Delta and United Airlines and cargo planes operated by FedEx, DHL and other similar entities belong to the commercial aviation category. These large facilities are almost always situated near major urban areas, and they ...
Human flighthas become a tired fact of modern life. At any given moment, roughly 5,000 airplanes crisscross the skies above the United States alone, amounting to an estimated 64 million commercial and private takeoffs every year [source:NATCA]. Consider the rest of the world's flight activit...
Many larger prop-driven aircraft boast propellers with adjustable pitch mechanisms. These mechanisms let the pilot adjust the propeller's angle of attack depending on air speed and altitude. There are, of course, variations. For example, in turbo prop planes, a gas turbine spins the propeller, ...
If you have ever seen a World War II bomber like the B-25 or the B-17, or if you have ever seen or been on an old commercial airplane like a DC-3, then you are familiar with something called a radial engine. Many planes of the WWII era used very large, very powerful radial...
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In many such accidents, the only devices that survive are the crash-survivable memory units (CSMUs) of the flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders. Typically, the rest of the recorders' chassis and inner components are mangled. The CSMU is a large cylinder that bolts onto the flat...
“If you're a passenger on a commercial aircraft, rest assured that will probably be the safest thing you do all day,” licensed civil engineer and aviation expert Sarah Hubbard, Ph.D., an assistant professor at Purdue University’s Polytechnic Institute, tells SELF. Commercial plane crashes ...
Why Planes Are Among the Safest Modes of Transportation, According to Aviation Experts Learn about built-in safety features. "Airplanes are mystical — albeit commonplace — machines. Theymake strange noisesand provide unique sensations. They're complex. And they operate in a system with few parall...
A few years ago,Popular Mechanicsput out anarticlethat analyzed every commercial plane crash in the U.S. and where survivors were sitting in each accident. The article’s author concluded that in the event of a crash, the safest place to be sitting was in the back of the...
Fear of flying can be caused by a number of factors, including claustrophobia or a fear of heights. Many nervous flyers feel irrational anxiety that their plane will malfunction and crash, no matter how many times they hear the statistics abouthow safe flying iscompared to driving. Other travel...