Content tagged with "air-travel"
Yes…ish. Some of them can under some circumstances. “Autoland” is a feature on some larger airlines. But it has limits: It has to be enabled and initiated. It doesn’t just do it automatically. The airport has to be equipped for it. The plane doesn’t really “land itself” – the plane and the airport…
Defining what actually constitutes an individual “plane” can be hard. In each case, there is a basic airframe , but there are sometimes dozens of variants of it . Some common changes: Also, there are often completely different configurations outside of commercial passenger service Over time,…
It has to do with the transition from two-letter to three-letter codes. Originally, airport codes were just two-letters. In Canada, they decided to use the same code as the Morse code for the corresponding Canadian railway station. Eventually, it became important to know if an airport had a weather…
In geometry, a “great circle” is a flat plane that cuts through the middle of a sphere. Essentially, it becomes the longer line that was drawn around that sphere. In aviation navigation, a “great circle route” is the shortest path between two points, and is achieved by finding the great circle that…
![](/huh/images/great-circle-route.jpg?w=150)
This is a value commonly used to describe the speed of an aircraft. It’s not a constant value. It represents the speed of sound in whatever air is being used at the time. The speed of sound changes with elevation and air density. Also, “speed of sound” is kind of a misnomer. What’s really being…
This is short for “tarmacadam,” which differs slightly from macadam. Wikipedia defines it as: Tarmacadam is a road surfacing material made by combining crushed stone, sand, and tar […] It is a more durable and dust-free enhancement of simple compacted stone macadam surfaces… Vocabulary.com says: The…