A Palmair jet bound for Portugal on Saturday 26th May had to make a bee-line (excuse the pun) for Bournemouth following an engine surge one hour into the flight. The pilots reported seeing a swarm of bees an estimated 20,000 strong just off the British Coast, and upon inspection the jet engine contained what seemed to be the remnants of a large amount of bees that had been sucked into the engine.

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Here’s a little tip for any PPL students which should help make things easier in the circuit. When flying circuits around your airfield, you can either judge the headings to fly by visually assessing your position in relation to the runway, or you can calculate the headings to fly by adding or subtracting 90 degrees dependent on whether it’s a left or right-hand circuit.

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The low cost model of airline competition has become widespread in countries throughout the world. Traditional full service carriers (FSCs) have found it difficult to compete with these low-cost and ‘no frill’ competitors. Some of the FSC airlines have attempted to create subsidiary lower cost airlines, such as BMIBaby and Virgin Express for example. Air Canada has pioneered a different way to compete, perhaps this could be a model for future airlines to adopt?

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How many of you have flown to Australia, not just 13,000 miles, but 13,000 miles in a microlight, when you are blind?! Miles Hilton-Barber, a 58 year old pilot finally arrived in Sydney Australia on the 30th April 2007,  55 days after taking off in a microlight from a UK airfield.

“Their flight took them over deserts, forests, mountains and seas and they battled with high winds, rain and snow storms in order to reach Sydney. You can read all about these adventures in the blog diaries.” - http://www.seeingisbelieving.org.uk/microlightadventure/

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Welcome to the first ever post on ‘The Flying Blog’ at PilotZone. Hopefully the title should say it all, but this is the first in hopefully a long-lasting series of flying and aviation related blog posts. The Flying Blog will feature aviation news, flying tips, flight training news and much more - bringing the information together into one source to keep you upto speed in the quickly-changing aviation industry.

The blog will not be too heavily biased either towards General Aviation (GA) or to the Commercial Airline side of things, but is hoped to get a tongue-in-cheek balance between the two to satisfy both professional pilots and sardine-tin drivers alike.

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