Stage 1 of 4
The sky
Twelve short answers about flight, aircraft and airports, every figure sourced to the body that publishes it.
Something goes over and you look it up. That's where most people meet aviation, and it's where this site starts. These twelve pages each take one question and answer it in a couple of hundred words, and every figure names the body that publishes it: the Civil Aviation Authority, the FAA, NASA, NOAA, NIST, the statute book. Where the usual explanation turns out to be something everyone repeats and nobody publishes, the page says so rather than passing it on. None of it asks you to buy anything.
The reading, in order
- How do planes fly?
- How high do planes fly?
- How fast do planes fly?
- What is a knot in aviation?
- What is turbulence?
- What are the main types of aircraft?
- What is a cockpit?
- Why are planes white?
- Why do planes leave white trails?
- What is a runway?
- What is an airport code?
- What is plane spotting?
What these pages keep concluding
Read the twelve together and one thing keeps surfacing: almost every answer here is about a specific machine in specific air on a specific afternoon. The cruising band, the runway in use, whether a trail hangs about or vanishes. That's also why a general aviation gift so rarely lands and a particular one does, which is what the next stage is about.
And after that
The stage that follows this one is your aircraft: One photograph of one particular aircraft, and everything that can honestly be done with it.
Written by Craig Fearn, The Aviation Gift Co.