Up in the air, junior bird man: from Ireland to Africa, lawnmower-ly

With a spirit somewhat akin to that of Ig Nobel Prize winner Troy (built a suit of armor to protect against grizzly bears) Hurtubise, comes “One man’s dream project to fly from Ireland to Africa by lawnmower gets under way this week“. The story is reported, with that headline, in The Journal: A FEW MONTHS […]

Fear of flying (amongst pilots)

Although there are a good number of academic papers which examine ‘fear of flying’, [recent example] the number of scholarly dissertations which cover ‘fear of flying’ amongst a specific subset of air travellers – viz. pilots – is very low. Perhaps just one. May we recommend the work of aviation practitioner, aviation historian, aviation philosopher, […]

The Moth to Flame Effect – is it real or not real?

‘The Moth to a Flame Effect’ (a.k.a ‘Perceptual Tropism’), was first formally described in 1953 by Clark, Nicholson and Graybiel in their paper ‘Fascination: a cause of pilot error‘ (for Journal of Aviation Medicine, 24(5):429-40.) Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t appear to be available online, but it describes how aircraft pilots sometimes fail to take evasive […]