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Information about the bombs on the planes:

Dubai bomb was flown on passenger planes

Bomb may have flown on passenger planes

UK says bomb could have brought down plane

Bomb plot prompts another look at Dubai crash

UAE rules out bomb in UPS plane crash in September

Information about the worst airlines:

America’s Meanest Airlines

Avianova video:

The Swamp Ghost Stories:

The Smithsonian story on the swamp ghost

The Swamp Ghost Website

I Love Planes’ Wings Wednesday Swamp Ghost Feature

Emirates, whose passengers are growing at 20 percent annually and expects to maintain this level for the next five years, will fulfill all its 90 orders so far for the A380 superjumbo, President Tim Clark told Reuters in an interview.

“We would like some more but we are going to run short of space,” he said. “120 was the baseline figure that the planners worked to get where we needed to be, but we couldn’t order that amount because it was too many for here so 90 was a compromise.”

The carrier will order more when it gets additional space at its home base in Dubai, he added.

Apparently, they see unlimited growth in their future. Their biggest limitation isn’t finding people to sit in their available seats, but rather it’s finding space to park, service, and use all of their A380 jets. Nice.

Here’s a picture of an Emirates A380 landing at Toronto Pearson Airport.

Emirates A380 A6-EDC With Reverse Thrusters

Photo credit: Mark Fisher

hint: it’s in the comments to a previous post on this site

Emirates A380 A6-EDC With Reverse Thrusters

Photo credit: Mark Fisher

According to the photographer, the plane had just landed at Toronto Pearson (YYZ) from Dubai. This is a great catch if you ask me.

Depending on where you read, the plane dropped 18,000 feet or it only dropped 200 feet. Also, the number of people injured varies between 20 and 23 of the passengers.

What all reports seem to agree on, is that flight EK530 was en route between Dubai and Kochi when it flew through a cumulonimbus cloud. While in the cloud, the plane flew through some turbulence that made the plane lose altitude quickly enough to injure some of the people onboard.

That’s about all that there is agreement on. How much the plane dropped is reportedly anywhere between 200 feet and 18,000 feet of altitude. Regardless of the actual amount, any turbulence or sudden descent that is fast enough to injure 20 people is pretty significant and I would say worthy of reporting to ATC.

According to a report in the India Times, the pilot of the Emirates plane did not think it worth reporting the incident until flight EK530 ”was to land.” I think we’ll need to wait until we look at the flight data, that is, if ATC somewhere in that neck of woods keeps track of that sort of thing.

(India Times)

Emirates 777

Photo Credit: Ingy The Wingy

“Holy cow, they still have airliner service in Somalia? They don’t even have a formal government over there!”

That’s pretty much what I thought too.

Apparently, at some point in November, a Somali man tried to board a Daalo Airlines plane that was flying from Mogasdishu to Dubai with a couple of stops along the way.

According to an Associated Press article published on Yahoo news, people in the know are saying that there are many similarities between the modus operandi of this Somali guy and that of the Nigerian guy that tried to blow up the Delta, I mean Northwest flight 253 on Christmas day.

The similarities are that both men had dry powder based explosives, syringes with liquids and wanted to blow up a plane.

It makes me think that this run in Somalia was a test for the eventual run in Detroit.

I wonder why the African Union military force stationed at the Mogadishu airport were able to get the guy before he boarded the plane while the Dutch and Nigerians couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Here’s the best, and most recent, picture I could find of the Mogadishu airport:

I wonder how the guys in Mogadishu figured out what was going on…

Photo credit: