The public response to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 pushed for live flight-data streaming. The rulebook delivered something smaller: an FAA requirement extending underwater locator beacon batteries from 30 to 90 days, with retrofit compliance by 2020, and an ICAO distress-tracking…

Star Dust, a British South American Airways Avro Lancastrian, vanished on 2 August 1947 on a Buenos Aires–Santiago flight with 11 people aboard. Its wreckage first emerged from Tupungato Glacier in 1998, when climbers near the 15,000-foot level came across…

Yes, people have survived in the wheel well of an airliner. The earliest documented survivor is Francisco Carvalho, a 30-year-old Portuguese man who rode the landing-gear bay of a KLM Douglas DC-3 from Lisbon to Natal, Brazil, on August 5,…

Sole survivors of aviation disasters so often describe guilt rather than relief because their survival feels unearned and inexplicable. The recurring "why me?" question is documented across at least six verified cases, from Vesna Vulović in 1972 to the 2025…

The Federal Aviation Act of 1958 created the Federal Aviation Agency and consolidated civil-military airspace oversight, but uncontrolled high-altitude airspace did not disappear overnight. The change was phased: no single 1958 rule stripped every high-altitude segment of its uncontrolled status.…