As the disappearance of a Malaysia Airlines jet continues to baffle investigators, we look at other famous aviation mysteries

Amelia Earhart

The pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937 while attempting to circumnavigate the globe. Various reasons have been given for her disappearance. Some claim she was a spy, and that she was shot down and captured by Japanese forces; some believe she faked her own death; and a few even claim she was abducted by aliens. Last year researchers claimed they had discovered remnants of her aircraft using sonar readings.

The Bermuda Triangle

The roughly triangular area bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico is where dozens of aircraft and ships are said to have vanished in unusual circumstances, with the disappearances attributed to paranormal or extraterrestrial activity.

Notable incidents include the disappearance of Flight 19, a US Navy bomber, on December 5, 1945, as well as the aircraft sent to search for it; that of a Douglas DC-3 aircraft with 32 people on board in 1948; and a mid-air collision between two US Air Force planes in 1963.

“D B Cooper”

In 1971, an unidentified man traveling under the name of “Dan Cooper” managed to hijack a Boeing 727, extort a $200,000 ransom, and leap from the rear exit on the aircraft (with a parachute), never to be seen again. No conclusive evidence has emerged confirming his true identity or subsequent whereabouts, but FBI investigators claimed he would not have survived the jump.

A year after the incident “Cooper vanes” were installed to disable aircraft doors while the landing gear is up.

Twa Flight 800

Trans World Airlines Flight 800, a Boeing 747, exploded and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches, New York, on July 17, 1996, resulting in the deaths of all 230 people on board.

While many speculated that terrorists were to blame, no evidence of a criminal act was discovered by the FBI following a 16-month investigation. Others suggested that a US Navy vessel blew up the plane with a missile strike, and that the US Government has since instigated a cover-up.

A report published on August 23, 2000, concluded that a short circuit was the most likely cause of the explosion.

Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571

On October 13, 1972, a Uruguayan air force plane carrying 40 passengers and five crew members disappeared while crossing the Andes. Seventy-two days later, after everyone on board was presumed dead, 16 survivors emerged. The story of how starvation drove them to eat some of the dead passengers was made into the 1993 film "Alive".

Air France Flight 447

In the early hours of June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went missing, along with 216 passengers and 12 crew. The Airbus A330-200 disappeared mid-ocean, beyond radar coverage and in darkness. It took a shocked and bewildered Air France six hours to concede its loss and for several days no trace of it was found. Even when wreckage was discovered, the tragedy was no less perplexing. The aircraft had flown through a thunderstorm, but there was no distress signal, and the jet was state-of-the-art, a type that had never before been involved in a fatal accident. The aircraft’s black boxes were recovered nearly two years later, at the bottom of the ocean. A final report, published in July 2012, said the accident occurred due obstruction of the “pitot tubes” due to ice crystals, which caused the auto-pilot to disengage, as well as human error. It later emerged that the pilot had only slept one hour the previous night after a romantic jaunt in Brazil with his girlfriend.

Helios Airways Flight 522

On August 14, 2005, air traffic controllers in Greece lost contact with Helios Airways Flight 522, but the plane remained in the holding pattern for Athens Airport for more than an hour. At one point, a Greek fighter jet was scrambled, and spotted the pilot slumped over the controls. Around half an hour later the plane started to descend, crashing into the hills near Grammatiko, killing all 121 passengers and crew (the deadliest air disaster in Greek history). An investigation revealed that a gradual loss of cabin pressure had left the crew incapacitated.

Flying Tiger Line Flight 739

On March 16, 1962, a Lockheed L-1049 Super Constellation propliner carrying 93 US soldiers and 3 South Vietnamese, disappeared in clear weather on its way to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, prompting an eight-day search of more than 200,000 square miles. Eye witnesses on a civilian tanker reported seeing an explosion, but no remains were ever found.

Egyptair Flight 990

In 1999, Egyptair Flight 990 from New York to Cairo plummeted into the Atlantic Ocean around 60 miles off the US coast. All 217 people died in the crash, but mystery still surrounds its cause. The Egyptian Flight Officer controlling the plane was recorded repeatedly saying "I rely on God" moments before the disaster, and a colleague claimed he crashed the jet as an act of revenge after being reprimanded by the airline for sexual misconduct, but an investigation concluded he did not deliberately cause the accident.

BSAA Avro Lancastrian Star Dust

In August 1947, Star Dust, a British South American Airways airliner vanished as it flew between Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Santiago, Chile, via Mendoza. No wreckage was discovered for over 50 years, provoking conspiracy theories about sabotage and abduction by aliens. A Rolls Royce engine and the remains of nine of the eleven victims were eventually found at the foot of a glacier in the Andes.

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The Aviation Safety Network has compiled a list of all aircraft that have been reported to have never been found.

The majority went missing at sea, 62, while 25 went missing over land.

The list shows that 28 were passenger planes, while 21 were military aircraft.

The period where the most aircraft went missing was between 1960-1969 and 1970-1979.

The latest missing flight, Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 — the whereabouts are still unknown, with the latest information speculating that debris has been found off  the Australian coast.

However, while the number of aircraft gone missing without a trace may seem like a particularly high figure, many of the aircraft went missing during a time when technology was not as it is today.

Irish coast

The map shows that an aircraft went missing off the coast of Ireland in 1955.

On 11 January 1955, two Avro Shackleton planes – WG531 and WL743 – of Royal Air Force No. 42 Squadron departed RAF St Eval on a routine exercise off the Fastnet Rock, off Ireland.

The Aviation Safety Network states that the two aircraft left St Eval at 10.14am and 10.20am respectively to carry out a 15 hour patrol and search exercise.

Although they left with just six minutes separation, radio messages were received indicating that the two captains had adjusted their separation and that up to 8pm that night were flying at the prescribed 85 miles distance from one another.

From 8.58pm all contact was lost.

Both aircraft were missing and never found despite a three-day search. It is assumed that both aircraft collided.

More than 11 years later, the starboard outer engine of WL743 was trawled up off the southwest Irish coast, about 75 miles north of the assumed collision point.

Here is a list of all the missing aircraft and the circumstances of their disappearance –click here>

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The ease with which a big jetliner melted into the ether after vanishing from Malaysian radar illustrates an uncomfortable paradox about modern aviation: state-of-the-art airplanes rely on ageing ground infrastructure to tell them where to go.

While satellites shape almost every aspect of modern life, the use of radar and radio in the cockpit has, for many pilots, changed little since before the jet engine was first flown.

Even though Malaysia suspects someone may have hidden its tracks, the inability of 26 nations to find a 250-tonne Boeing 777 has shocked an increasingly connected world and exposed flaws in the use of radar, which fades over oceans and deserts.

"It's not very accurate. The world's moved a bit further along," said Don Thoma, president of Aireon, a venture launched by U.S.-based mobile satellite communications company Iridium and the Canadian air traffic control authority in 2012 to offer space-based tracking of planes.

"We track our cars, we track our kids' cell phones, but we can't track airplanes when they are over oceans or other remote areas," he told Reuters.

Satellites provide the obvious answer, say experts.

"The way to go is satellite-based navigation and communication. In navigation, we need to get away from ground-based radar and in communications we need to get away from radios," said radar expert and aviation consultant Hans Weber.

Costly Overhaul

Inefficiencies caused by radar are costing travelers money through increased fares and penalizing economies through extra delays, according to those who back an ambitious but potentially costly overhaul of the world's major aviation routes.

"Since controllers use voice communication, they have to leave more space between planes because of the risk of losing contact," said Weber, who heads TECOP International, a U.S.-based consultancy.

Two mammoth proposals for new airspace systems in the United States and European Union could change all that, with hefty profits at stake for aerospace firms on both sides of the Atlantic, though critics say the schemes are wasteful and late.

The U.S. aerospace industry has been pressing for years for a $40 billion overhaul of air traffic control systems, but the cost and complexity of the undertaking have slowed the effort and Congress has cut funding repeatedly.

The Next-Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, is due to be fully implemented in 2025, but automatic U.S. federal spending cuts due to resume in 2016 could delay that, the industry says.

Parts of the system are already in place, such as the ADS-B surveillance system now installed in many cockpits, but others have lagged due to funding constraints.

Lockheed Martin, Harris Corp, Exelis Inc and Raytheon are among key contractors.

Europe, which has some of the world's busiest skies with an estimated 33,000 flights a day, has ambitious plans through the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR). This research program aims to triple airspace capacity, halve air traffic management costs and revamp Europe's infrastructure by 2020.

A 2011 McKinsey study said implementing SESAR could boost EU gross domestic product by 419 billion euros from 2013 to 2030, create 328,000 jobs and cut flight times by 10 percent.

This project, too, has been beset by delays due to friction over the control of airspace and Europe's debt crisis. Airbus, Thales and Honeywell are involved in the scheme. Some controllers' unions oppose the plan.

Canadian company FLYHT Aerospace Solutions has developed a satellite- and Internet-based system that is used by 40 operators such as airlines and business jet operators to monitor aircraft systems, map flight paths, provide voice communications, and on-demand streaming of black box data.

Richard Hayden, a company director, said the system could serve as a backup for navigational systems since it also provides GPS tracking, cockpit voice, data and text via Iridium satellites. However, he said the system would not meet all the specific navigation requirements now spelled out for next-generation air traffic control systems.

Crackly Radios

For decades air traffic controllers, working at their radar screens and using clipped radio communications with pilots, helped planes to thread their way through increasingly crowded airspace and maintain a low industry accident record.

These included crackly high-frequency links over stretches of ocean like the busy North Atlantic, where pilots try to report at regular intervals or pass messages via other jets.

On such routes planes equipped with satellite communications

now increasingly use a messaging system called CPDLC to establish a data link with controllers, several pilots said. Using the same system, they can request changes in altitude too.

But it is not yet standard and the system needs airlines to pay for satellite service, something not all are willing to do.

Indeed, Malaysian Airlines had not signed up for satellite service on the jet which disappeared on March 8, complicating efforts to track the missing aircraft. Malaysian officials have not ruled out technical problems with the jet.

Simply providing the connectivity is not enough, however, and this is one reason the cockpit is moving into the digital age at a slower pace than the smart phones of their passengers.

"It has got to be super-reliable and secure. You can't rely on any system that has a failure rate that would be perfectly acceptable for a cellphone: say, 1 in 100 calls. In aircraft, one in a billion is an acceptable safety factor," said Weber.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington and Brenda Goh in London; Editing by Gareth Jones)

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When Lieutenant Colonel Richard (Dick) Cole participated in the first American bombing raid on Japan in World War II, his plane was destined not to return to the U.S.

That plane, along with 15 others that were part of the raid, was destroyed behind enemy lines.

More than 70 years later, Reddit users asked Cole about the legendary Doolittle Raid, named after its leader Lt. Col. James (Jimmy) Doolittle.

Cole, Doolittle's co-pilot, described the terror of bailing out of his airplane. He also explains the sense of patriotism that compelled him to join the incredibly dangerous mission, which came in response to Pearl Harbor.

In order to reach distant Tokyo and other cities, the B-25 bombers that took part in the mission had to take off from the USS Hornet aircraft carrier in the ocean, 650 miles from Japan. However, it was impossible to get back to the carrier after the mission. Instead, they planned to land on airfields in friendly areas of Japanese-occupied China.

Some users asked Cole how he viewed his role in such scary mission.

Others asked him about the thoughts that went through his mind before the one-way mission.

The crew members replaced guns on board the aircraft with painted broomsticks in order to lighten the planes’ loads, Cole confirmed. “It certainly had a few quirks after we essentially gutted it prior to the raid,” Cole wrote of his plane. “We had to make sure they would be the right weight to take off from the Hornet.”

The toughest and most memorable part of the April 18, 1942 raid was “looking at that black hole [the escape hatch] when we had to jump out of a perfectly good airplane,” according to Cole.

The bomber that Doolittle flew ran out of gas over China behind enemy lines, forcing the gunner, bombardier, navigator, co-pilot, and pilot to bail out, according to Cole’s own account. The plane was flying at 9,000 feet, 166 miles per hour, putting a wide distance between each crewman as they parachuted into the rainy nighttime countryside.

Cole’s parachute caught in a tree where he spent the night, before roaming in a westerly direction over steep terrain. He eventually stumbled upon an outpost of pro-American Chinese guerrilla fighters, who reunited him with the rest of his crew and smuggled them past Japanese forces to a location where American aircraft retrieved them.

At 98 years old, Cole shared some simple life advice for much younger Reddit users.

Click here to read his full AMA.

SEE ALSO:  Amazing Color Photos Of America Preparing For World War II

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Editor's Note: The following excerpt is from "Cockpit Confidential," by Patrick Smith. March 27, 2014 marks the 37th anniversary of the deadliest accident in aviation history.

On this day in 1977, a pair of fully loaded Boeing 747s collided on the runway of Los Rodeos Airport on the island of Tenerife. The collision resulted in the deaths of 583 of the 644 passengers on board the two jumbo jets.

Nearly 40 years later, the Tenerife Air Disaster remains a watershed moment that transformed how the aviation industry views safety not just in the air, but on the ground as well. 

The book is available on Amazon and more information can be found on the "Cockpit Confidential" website.

Most people have never heard of Tenerife, a pan — shaped speck in the Atlantic. It’s one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic chain governed by the Spanish, clustered a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. The big town on Tenerife is Santa Cruz, and its airport, beneath a set of cascading hillsides, is called Los Rodeos. There, on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s — one belonging to KLM, the other to Pan Am — collided on a foggy runway. Five hundred and eighty--three people were killed in what remains the biggest air disaster in history.

The magnitude of the accident speaks for itself, but what makes it particularly unforgettable is the startling set of ironies and coincidences that preceded it. Indeed, most airplane crashes result not from a single error or failure, but from a chain of improbable errors and failures, together with a stroke or two of really bad luck. Never was this illustrated more calamitously— almost to the point of absurdity— than on that Sunday afternoon almost forty years ago.

In 1977, in only its eighth year of service, the Boeing 747 was already the biggest, the most influential, and possibly the most glamorous commercial jetliner ever built. For just those reasons, it was hard not to imagine what a story it would be — and how much carnage might result — should two of these behemoths ever hit each other. Really, though, what were the chances of that — a Hollywood script if ever there was one.

Imagine we’re there:

Both of the 747s at Tenerife are charters. Pan Am has come from Los Angeles, after a stopover in New York, KLM from its home base in Amsterdam. As it happens, neither plane is supposed to be on Tenerife. They were scheduled to land at Las Palmas, on the nearby island of Grand Canary, where many of the passengers were on their way to meet cruise ships. After a bomb planted by Canary Island separatists exploded in the Las Palmas airport flower shop, they diverted to Los Rodeos, along with several other flights, arriving around 2:00 p.m.

The Pan Am aircraft, registered N736PA, is no stranger to notoriety. In January 1970, this very same plane completed the inaugural commercial voyage of a 747, between New York’s Kennedy airport and London--Heathrow. Somewhere on its nose is the dent from a champagne bottle. White with a blue window stripe, it wears the name ClipperVictor along the forward fuselage. The KLM 747, also blue and white, is named the Rhine.

Let’s not forget the airlines themselves: Pan Am, the most storied franchise in the history of aviation, requires little introduction. KLM, for its part, is the oldest continuously operating airline in the world, founded in 1919 and highly regarded for its safety and punctuality.

The KLM captain, Jacob Van Zanten, whose errant takeoff roll will soon kill nearly six hundred people, including himself, is the airline’s top 747 instructor pilot and a KLM celebrity. If passengers recognize him, it’s because his confident, square-jawed visage stares out from KLM’s magazine ads. Later, when KLM executives first get word of the crash, they will attempt to contact Van Zanten in hopes of sending him to Tenerife to aid the investigation team.

The normally lazy Los Rodeos is packed with diverted flights. The Rhine and ClipperVictor sit adjacent to each other at the southeast corner of the apron, their wingtips almost touching. Finally at around four o’clock, Las Palmas begins accepting traffic again. Pan Am is quickly ready for departure, but the lack of room and the angle at which the jets face each other requires that KLM begin to taxi first.

The weather is fine until just before the accident, and if not for KLM requesting extra fuel at the last minute, both would be on their way sooner. During the delay, a heavy blanket of fog swoops down from the hills and envelopes the airport. That fuel also means extra weight, affecting how quickly the 747 is able to become airborne. For reasons you’ll see in a moment, that will be critical.

Because of the tarmac congestion, the normal route to runway 30 is blocked. Departing planes will need to taxi down on the runway itself. Reaching the end, they’ll make a 180-degree turn before taking off in the opposite direction. This procedure, rare at commercial airports, is called a “back-taxi.” At Tenerife in ’77, it will put two 747s on the same runway at the same time, invisible not only to each other, but also to the control tower. The airport has no ground tracking radar.

KLM taxis ahead and onto the runway, with the Pan Am Clipper ambling several hundred yards behind. Captain Van Zanten will steer to the end, turn around, then hold in position until authorized for takeoff. Pan Am’s instructions are to turn clear along a left-side taxiway to allow the other plane’s departure. Once safely off the runway, Pan Am will report so to the tower.

Unable to differentiate the taxiways in the low visibility, the Pan Am pilots miss their assigned turnoff. Continuing to the next one is no big problem, but now they’re on the runway for several additional seconds.

At the same time, having wheeled into position at the end, Van Zanten comes to a stop. His first officer, Klaas Meurs, takes the radio and receives the ATC route clearance. This is not a takeoff clearance, but rather a procedure outlining turns, altitudes, and frequencies for use once airborne. Normally it is received well prior to an aircraft taking the runway, but the pilots have been too busy with checklists and taxi instructions until now. They are tired, annoyed, and anxious to get going. The irritability in the pilots’ voices, Van Zanten’s in particular, has been duly noted by the control tower and other pilots.

There are still a couple dominos yet to fall, but now the final act is in motion—literally. Because the route clearance comes where and when it does, it is mistaken for a takeoff clearance as well. First officer Meurs, sitting to Van Zanten’s right, acknowledges the altitudes, headings, and fixes, then finishes off with an unusual, somewhat hesitant phrase, backdropped by the sound of accelerating engines. “We are now, uh, at takeoff.”

Van Zanten releases the brakes. “Wegaan,” he is heard saying on the cockpit voice recorder. “Let’s go.” And with that, his mammoth machine begins barreling down the fog--shrouded runway, completely without permission.

“At takeoff” is not standard phraseology among pilots. But it’s explicit enough to grab the attention of the Pan Am crew and the control tower. It’s hard for either party to believe KLM is actually moving, but both reach for their microphones to make sure.

“And we’re still taxiing down the runway,” relays Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer.

At the same instant, the tower radios a message to KLM. “Okay,” says the controller. “Stand by for takeoff. I will call you.”

There is no reply. This silence is taken as a tacit, if not exactly proper, acknowledgment.

Either of these transmissions would be, should be, enough to stop Van Zanten cold in his tracks. He still has time to discontinue the roll. The problem is, because they occur simultaneously, they overlap.

Pilots and controllers communicate via two--way VHF radios. The process is similar to speaking over a walkie--talkie: a person activates a microphone, speaks, then releases the button and waits for an acknowledgment. It differs from using a telephone, for example, as only one party can speak at a time, and has no idea what his message actually sounds like over the air. If two or more microphones are clicked at the same instant, the transmissions cancel each other out, delivering a noisy occlusion of static or a high--pitched squeal called a heterodyne. Rarely are heterodynes dangerous. But at Tenerife this is the last straw.

Van Zanten hears only the word “okay,” followed by a five--second squeal. He keeps going.

Ten seconds later there is one final exchange, clearly and maddeningly audible on the post--crash tapes. “Report when runway clear,” the tower says to Pan Am.

“We’ll report when we’re clear,” acknowledges Bob Bragg.

Focused on the takeoff, Van Zanten and his first officer apparently miss this. But the second officer, sitting behind them, does not. Alarmed, with their plane now racing forward at a hundred knots, he leans forward. “Is he not clear?” he asks. “That Pan American?”

“Oh, yes,” Van Zanten answers emphatically.

In the Pan Am cockpit, nose--to--nose with the still unseen, rapidly approaching interloper, there’s a growing sense that something isn’t right. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Captain Victor Grubbs says nervously.

A few moments later, the lights of the KLM 747 emerge out of the grayness, dead ahead, 2,000 feet away and closing fast.

“There he is!” cries Grubbs, shoving the thrust levers to full power. “Look at him! Goddamn, that son of a bitch is coming!” He yanks the plane’s steering tiller, turning left as hard as he can, toward the grass at the edge of the runway.

“Get off! Get off! Get off!” shouts Bob Bragg.

Van Zanten sees them, but it’s too late. Attempting to leapfrog, he pulls back on the elevators, dragging his tail along the pavement for 70 feet in a hail of sparks. He almost makes it, but just as his plane breaks ground, its undercarriage and engines slice into the ceiling of the Victor, instantly demolishing its midsection and setting off a series of explosions.

Badly damaged, the Rhine settles back to the runway, skids hard on its belly for another thousand feet, and is consumed by fire before a single one of its 248 occupants can escape. Remarkably, of 396 passengers and crew aboard the Pan Am jumbo, 61 of them survived, including all five people in the cockpit—-the three--man crew and two off--duty employees riding in the jumpseats. 

Over the past few years, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet two of those Pan Am survivors and hear their stories firsthand. I say that nonchalantly, but this is probably the closest I’ve ever come to meeting, for lack of a better term, a hero. Romanticizing the fiery deaths of 583 people is akin to romanticizing war, but there’s a certain mystique to the Tenerife disaster, a gravity so strong that shaking these survivors’ hands produced a feeling akin to that of a little kid meeting his favorite baseball player. These men were there, emerging from the wreckage of what, for some of us, stands as an event of mythic proportions.

One of those survivors was Bob Bragg, the Pan Am first officer. I met him in Los Angeles, on the set of a documentary being made for the thirtieth anniversary of the accident.

It was Bragg who had uttered, “And we’re still taxiing down the runway”—seven easy words that should have saved the day, but instead were lost forever in the shriek and crackle of a blocked transmission. Just thinking about it gives me the chills.

But there’s nothing dark about Bob Bragg—nothing that, on the surface, feels moored to the nightmare of ’77. He’s one of the most easygoing people you’ll ever meet. Gray-haired, bespectacled, and articulate, he looks and sounds like what he is: a retired airline pilot.

God knows how many times he’s recounted the collision to others. He speaks about the accident with a practiced ease, in a voice of modest detachment, as if he’d been a spectator watching from afar. You can read all the transcripts, pore over the findings, watch the documentaries a hundred times over. Not until you sit with Bob Bragg and hear the unedited account, with all of the strange and astounding details that are normally missing, do you get a full sense of what happened. The basic story is well known; it’s the ancillaries that make it moving—and surreal:

Bragg describes the initial impact as little more than “a bump and some shaking.” All five men in the cockpit, located at the forward end of the 747’s distinctive upper--deck hump, saw the KLM jet coming and had ducked. Knowing they’d been hit, Bragg instinctively reached upward in an effort to pull the “fire handles”—a set of four overhead-mounted levers that cut off the supply of fuel, air, electricity, and hydraulics running to and from the engines. His arm groped helplessly. When he looked up, the roof was gone.

Turning around, he realized that the entire upper deck had been sheared off at a point just aft of his chair. He could see all the way aft to the tail, 200 feet behind him. The fuselage was shattered and burning. He and Captain Grubbs were alone in their seats, on a small, fully exposed perch 35 feet above the ground. Everything around them had been lifted away like a hat. The second officer and jumpseat stations, their occupants still strapped in, were hanging upside-down through what seconds earlier was the ceiling of the first class cabin.

There was no option other than to jump. Bragg stood up and hurled himself over the side. He landed in the grass three stories below, feet-first, and miraculously suffered little more than an injured ankle. Grubbs followed, and he too was mostly unharmed. The others from the cockpit would unfasten their belts and shimmy down the sidewalls to the main cabin floor before similarly leaping to safety. 

Once on the ground, they faced a deafening roar. The plane had been pancaked into the grass, but because the cockpit control lines were severed, the engines were still running at full power. It took several moments before the motors began coming apart. Bragg remembers one of the engines’ huge forward turbofans detaching from its shaft, falling forward onto the ground with a thud.

The fuselage was engulfed by fire. A number of passengers, most of them seated in forward portions of the cabin, had made it onto the craft’s left wing, and were standing at the leading edge, about 20 feet off the ground. Bragg ran over, encouraging them to jump. A few minutes later, the plane’s center fuel tank exploded, propelling a plume of flames and smoke a thousand feet into the sky.

The airport’s ill-equipped rescue team, meanwhile, was over at the KLM site, the first wreckage they’d come to after learning there’d been an accident. They hadn’t yet realized that two planes were involved, one of them with survivors. Eventually, authorities opened the airport perimeter gates, urging anybody with a vehicle to drive toward the crash scene to help. Bob Bragg tells the cracked story of standing there in fog, surrounded by stunned and bleeding survivors, watching his plane burn, when suddenly a taxicab pulls up out of nowhere.Bragg returned to work a few months later. He eventually transferred to United when that carrier took over Pan Am’s Pacific routes in the late 1980s, and retired from the company as a 747 captain. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Dorothy. (Captain Grubbs has since passed away, as has second officer George Warns.)

During the documentary shoot, I traveled with Bob Bragg and the producers to the aircraft storage yards at Mojave, California, where he was interviewed alongside a mothballed 747, describing that incredible leap from the upper--deck.

A day earlier, using a flight deck mock--up, director Phil Desjardins filmed a reenactment of the Tenerife collision, with a trio of actors sitting in as the KLM crew. To provide the actors with a helpful demo, it was suggested that Bob Bragg and I get inside the mock-up and run through a practice takeoff.

Bragg took the captain’s seat, and I took the first officer’s seat. We read through a makeshift checklist and went through the motions of a simulated takeoff. That’s when I looked across, and all of a sudden it hit me: Here’s Bob Bragg, lone surviving pilot of Tenerife, sitting in a cockpit, pretending to be Jacob Van Zanten, whose error made the whole thing happen.

Surely Bragg wanted no part of this dreary karma, and I hadn’t the courage to make note of it out loud—assuming it hadn’t already dawned on him. But I could barely keep the astonishment to myself. One more creepy irony in a story so full of them.

Closing note: On the thirtieth anniversary of the crash, a memorial was dedicated overlooking the Tenerife airport, honoring those who perished there. The sculpture is in the shape of a helix. “A spiral staircase,” the builders describe it. “[…] a symbol of infinity.” Maybe, but I’m disappointed that the more obvious physical symbolism is ignored: early model 747s, including both of those in the crash, were well known for the set of spiral stairs connecting their main and upper decks (seeHighArt, page 23). In the minds of millions of international travelers, that stairway is something of a civil aviation icon. How evocative and poetically appropriate for the memorial—-even if the designers weren’t thinking that way.

©Sourcebooks 2013

SEE ALSO: 2014: The Best Airports In The World

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The backlash in China over missing commercial plane Flight 370 has led to a travel boycott to Malaysia.

Spurred mostly by online conversation, the boycott has since snowballed to involve several local airline booking websites.

On popular microblog social media platform Weibo, the topic “Malaysia tourism” was trending for several days, with most users expressing disinterest in traveling to Malaysia following what they perceived as a mishandled response to the missing flight that was carrying mostly Chinese passengers.

Many mainland Chinese, including several outspoken celebrities, have since called for an official travel boycott.

Several of China’s largest online ticketing and travel booking portals have joined the public outrage, announcing the refusal to issue tickets using Malaysia Airlines, and instead, allowing customers to book flights to the Southeast Asian nation through other Chinese airlines.

Agencies like eLong, LY.com, Qunar and Mango, which are some of China’s most popular travel websites, say that their new Malaysia Airlines-free services will last indefinitely.

“We will continue the ban indefinitely until the Malaysian government and Malaysia Airlines release every piece of information they have in order to find out the truth about the missing flight as soon as possible,” eLong posted on its official Weibo account page.

Two of the passengers on the missing Beijing-bound flight reportedly booked their flights through eLong. As a gesture of good faith, eLong said that it would also pay the families of both passengers 100,000 yuan “as a consolation.”

LY.com similarly posted a statement on its Weibo profile saying it was willing to offer full refunds to customers that wanted to cancel existing bookings using the airline, and would follow the ban until the Malaysian airline “sorts out the truth and offers a satisfactory explanation to all the victims and the Chinese people.”

The online response to the ticketing ban and refunds has been very positive among users, which can often be an appropriate gauge of a company, brand or person’s public perception. “This is the solidarity we need. They [Malaysian Airlines] need to be accountable to all of us,” one person said, reposting the statement by eLong.

“Even if you don’t go along with the travel ban, why give business to a company that is such a mess. Book trips on a different airline,” another blogger chimed in.

One company, Ctrip (NASDAQ: ADR), however, did not go along with the airline ban. As of Friday, the website continues to offer Malaysian Airlines flights as a booking option on flights between China and Malaysia. Ctrip is China’s leading travel website and said it would not be following the lead of competitors.

The reason? “Objections raised by the sales department,” a Ctrip employee told the South China Morning Post anonymously. Ctrip is a NASDAQ-listed company that leads the market with nearly 50 percent of the total online travel-booking market.

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Sleeping on an airplane often requires more effort than it does relaxation, but it is absolutely worth it.

Late night flights are called "red eyes" for a reason and no matter how energetic or fit you may be, muscling through your day on minimal sleep is never a good idea.

RELATED: 10 Best Ways To Beat Jet Lag

That said, late night flights are also an extremely practical way to get more bang for your vacation buck. The key is to have a system for getting some shuteye between runways. Here's a few tips that can make nodding off considerably easier.

Choose Your Itinerary Wisely

When overnight travel is inevitable, nothing is more important than choosing the right itinerary. Pick the nonstop every time and, if one isn't available, choose the itinerary with the longest single leg. You'll have more uninterrupted time to nap, wake up, and try to doze off again. Late departures are especially helpful unless you plan to work during the trip. 

Next, consider the seat type and location. Use the restroom before you board and pick a window seat. It provides more space to lean against the window and no one will climb over you. Seats near the front of the cabin tend to be quieter, but avoid anything near a lavatory or galley.

Save frequent flyer miles for long-haul international flights that have lie-flat seats in first or business class. Carriers known for exceptionally high standards – including Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific, and Emirates – have extra-wide seats similar to a real bed. Others pack in business class passengers like sardines or use seats that recline at an angle. Use SeatGuru or Routehappy to learn more about the options on your flight.

RELATED: How to Maximize Your Air Miles

Prepare Your Body

Some people swear by prescription sleep aids, but always consult a physician before attempting to use medication to get better sleep. And you'll want to avoid alcohol, which, coupled with the dry air, may cause dehydration and make waking up a nightmare. Stay hydrated during the day so you can avoid eating or drinking anything during the flight and restroom breaks. The most dedicated travelers will gradually adjust their alarm clocks up to three hours earlier than normal. You're not getting quality sleep so there is some virtue in at least getting a jump on handling jet lag – especially if you're headed west and will be going to be earlier than usual.

Finally, bring some high quality earplugs and a facemask to keep out unwanted sound and light. Don't rely on the cheap freebies provided, which are scratchy at best. Loose clothing will help avoid the stuffy feeling that comes from recirculated air. Untuck your shirt before you shut your eyes.

RELATED: 12 Travel Mistakes to Avoid

Recover from the Ordeal

A problem with most red-eye flights is that you arrive exhausted in the morning. In order to wake up, head to the lounge or your hotel and submerge your face in the nearest sink. Your body's reflex is to lower your heart rate when your head is submerged.  You'll feel calmer and, a cup of coffee later, ready to face the day.

Next, find food. Some protein and fiber will provide more lasting energy than the sugar rush from a doughnut. Snacks, like showers, can be found at many airport lounges, so either buy a day pass or purchase a membership if you regularly take overnight flights. Nuts are a good call. Eat more of them than you were offered on the plane.

More from Men's Journal:

• How to Fly Like a VIP Without Elite Status
• How to Charter a Private Jet (Without Breaking the Bank)
• How and When to Take A Flight Bump

SEE ALSO: '60 Minutes' Used Fake Engine Sounds For Its Story On The All-Electric Tesla Model S

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More than 66 million travelers flew in and out of Los Angeles International Airport last year, making it the third-busiest airport in the world.

In 2013, there were an average of 1,685 takeoffs and landings a day at LAX: That's one takeoff or landing every minute. Needless to say, the airspace in and around the airport is incredibly crowded.

Architectural photographer and aviation geek Michael Kelley decided, one smog-free Sunday morning, to spend the day photographing the action at LAX.

Perched on top of the hill at Clutter's Park with camera in hand, Kelley spent seven hours baking under the California sun. Tired and sunburned, he eventually took the more than 400 pictures that would serve as the basis for the amazing photo, which we first saw on reddit/r/LosAngeles.

Click here for more of Mike Kelley's work.

SEE ALSO: The 10 Best Airports In North America

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Airline ticket buying advice is mostly all stupid. That is except, of course, mine.

I’ve heard countless theories about when the best time to buy a plane ticket is. You can buy it on a Tuesday or Wednesday, three months or exactly 183 days out from departure, or even better, when a black cat decides to cross a ladder.

I’ve always called it a voodoo science for a reason. The truth is, at the end of the day, there really is no substitution for advance planning.

Just to illustrate how bogus airline buying advice can get, Gary Leff from View from the Wing held a pretty silly contest about anyone who could concoct the most ridiculous-but-possibly-true hypothesis on why it’s best to book a ticket in the wee early hours of Friday. Larry V ended up posting this awesome theory that sounds just as good as anything that’s published these days:

3:15am on a Friday is the best time to book a ticket (note: This is 3:15am UTC, or Universal Coordinated Time). Why? Because this corresponds to 5:15pm at the International Dateline (UTC+14).

Back when the airlines were designing more sophisticated revenue management computer algorithms in the 80s, they knew that businesses were most likely to pay higher fares, so they designed a "5 day business day window" which corresponded to the typical 9-5 business week. They designed them to load the highest fares at 9am on Monday and ended them at 5pm on a Friday. However, the programmers had to pick a starting point, and so they picked the starting point as the time at the International Date Line, so that the very first cities to experience the new business day would start buying the new fares.

At 5pm on Friday at the International Date Line, these 5-day window of higher fares expires, and the leisure fares are reloaded. It takes time to propagate through the system, so 5:15pm (or 3:15am UTC) is a good guideline to make sure all the business fares have expired.

It is of course true, because everything on the Internet is. You decide.

SEE ALSO: How One Plane Ticket Let A Guy Eat For Free For A Year

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Airbus has finally released photos of the interior of its new jetliner, and it looks pretty swanky.

The A350 XWB has been in the works for about a decade and represents the latest effort to improve passenger comfort, aerodynamics, and fuel efficiency. It's one of the first commercial jets to be made primarily of composite materials instead of metal, and it promises "comfort without compromise."

Economy class will feature rows of nine seats, with each seat measuring 18 inches wide. Here's a rendering:

Airbus is offering a new generation of in-flight entertainment options. The electronics that back up the screens are set up so they don't take up space under the seat, leaving for passengers' feet.

Business class looks like a nice place to spend a few hours:

With LED lighting, airlines can choose from 16.7 million color options.

Airbus said it would offer airlines the choice of using a new lightweight seat from Recaro:

Here's the A350:

SEE ALSO: The Brand-New Airbus Jetliner Has Made Its Public Debut, And It Looks Awesome

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HAMBURG (Reuters) - Ever fancied seeing your name in lights as you boarded a plane? A hologram to take you through your in-flight entertainment options? Or how about something simpler, like an easy place to rest your tablet?

Exhibitors at the Aircraft Interiors Expo in Hamburg demonstrated these ideas and more as they sought to win airline customers with new seats, lighting and entertainment systems.

This may all seem like window dressing - but the commercial aircraft cabin interior market is estimated at almost $13 billion in annual sales in 2014 and expected to grow to over $17 billion in 2019, according to research by Markets and Markets.

Germany-based Diehl Aerosystems demonstrated a new cabin management system, whereby passengers could scan their boarding cards on a screen as they stepped onto the plane.

Lights would then come on in the panels of the aircraft with the passenger's seat number and name to help them to their seat, with the aim of speeding up boarding.

Diehl's other new technology on show at the fair included an on-board lavatory with sensors so you can raise and lower the lid and seat without touching them. "Hygiene is becoming an ever more important topic," its Chief Executive Rainer von Borstel told Reuters.

Thompson Aero Seating has a novel solution to the problem of fighting over armrests with your neighbor - staggered seats. And it says the design actually makes it possible to fit more seats into a cabin than usual. Finding that crucial first customer is proving tough, however.

"Because it's so different and radical, lots of people want to go second, but no one wants to be first," said Andy Morris, vice-president of sales and marketing at the Northern Ireland-based firm.

TABLET POWER

But much of the new technology at the Apr. 8-10 fair was designed with the tablet-toting traveler in mind.

Representatives of aerospace supplier Honeywell cited data estimating there will be 10 billion mobile devices, such as those made by Apple and Samsung in the world by 2016, for a global population of about 7.3 billion.

"The newest trends are all about tablet holders and power," Recaro Aircraft Seating CEO Mark Hiller told Reuters.

U.S. start-up Skycast, which provides airlines including Westjet with Samsung and Dell tablets to rent out to customers, was demonstrating a new tablet holder that can be easily fixed on to existing seats, holding anything from smartphones up to 10.3 inch tablets, including cases.

Established German seat manufacturer Recaro, which also makes child car seats, has also designed new tablet holders in its seats that are positioned higher up, meaning passengers can easily watch films and still use the table.

UK-based Acro Aircraft Seating meanwhile has designed a new tablet table aimed at low-cost carriers, such as customer Spirit Airlines. The table holds only a tablet and a drink.

EYE TECH

The increasing use of tablet technology made In Flight Entertainment (IFE) a hot issue at the Hamburg fair this year, with the organizers having to put up a temporary building to accommodate a 10 percent increase in the space requested by exhibitors active in this area.

UK-based aerospace and defense manufacturer BAE Systems is teaming up with Samsung to come up with an IFE system based around tablet devices. Replacing traditional seat-back entertainment systems with tablets on wide-bodied aircraft could save between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds in weight, BAE's director of cabin programs, Jared Schoemaker, said.

BAE said the use of tablets could be taken further. Cabin crew could use a smartphone with fingerprint technology to alter lighting on board, dim windows or adjust the amount of power going to each seat. They could even use Samsung's wearable technology devices on their wrists to receive alerts such as passenger calls.

Panasonic also said it was looking at wearable devices that passengers could use as boarding cards and showed off a new HD screen and a three-dimensional hologram that may one day be used for in-flight entertainment systems.

Meanwhile, Thales - one of the world's largest makers of IFE systems - unveiled a new business-class seat that allows passengers to control their entertainment options using eye movement, hand gestures or a touchpad built into the seat.

(Editing by Pravin Char)

SEE ALSO: Airbus Reveals The Swanky Cabin In Its New Jetliner

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It’s still dark in Seattle at 5:00 a.m. as passengers check in for early-morning departures. But one of Southwest Airlines’ most hardworking employees, about to begin a 14-hour workday, has already been waiting here at Sea-Tac Airport since the previous evening: the airplane itself.

Tail number N446WN, a Boeing 737-700, arrived here last night from Sacramento. And Chicago. And Tampa.  And Rochester, N.Y. And Orlando. In one day, this single plane, now resting at gate B10, flew over 5,600 miles, carrying a total potential passenger load of 715 persons over 806,000 seat-miles—over three times the distance to the moon. On a light day.

This morning, the plane’s 6:00 a.m. scheduled departure from Sea-Tac Airport is its first on another five-leg day, bound ultimately for West Palm Beach, Fla., via four other cities. Virginia Spears of Port Orchard, Wash., flying from Seattle to Chicago this morning, will not meet Stan and Marcia Treiman of Bohemia, N.Y., who are later flying from Tampa to Long Island—even though all three will fly on the same day on the same airplane.

In order for the airplane to be on its way on time, flight attendant Mike Maldonado is due at the gate at 5:30, along with colleagues Carol Leone and Margie Nelson. No later than twenty-five minutes from 5:30, the plane will also have been visually inspected, says Capt. Brad Dunham, who will be in charge of the plane today until Baltimore, three stops hence. 

By 5:55 a.m., with the passengers boarded, the plane inspected, snacks and beverage cans in place, and the boarding door closed tail N446WN pushes from the gate as Southwest flight 1296. Fourteen taxi-minutes later, it lifts off from runway 16L, turns eastward, and climbs up over the Cascade Mountains.

The cabin crew serves drinks as the sun comes up over Idaho some forty minutes later, the plane now flying at 569 miles per hour relative to the ground. Sitting aft, company historian Richard West, along for today’s ride, examines the plane’s ACARS data on his tablet.

ACARS, or the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, is a messaging service that connects the cockpit and the plane’s computers to Southwest’s dispatch facility in Dallas. Throughout the day, the system will transmit takeoff, touchdown, and fueling data, along with messages between the pilots and dispatchers. The plane automatically sent a message at the moment it lifted off from Sea-Tac at 6:09, says West, and later, a dispatcher uses the system to message the pilots, informing them that they’re the first Southwest plane over Helena, Mont., today.

At about 11:30 a.m. under a sunny Chicago sky, Capt. Brad Dunham guides the plane through a final hard right-hand turn to land on runway 13C at Midway Airport. The computer logs the landing-time of 11:33 a.m. for dispatchers, and the plane taxis to gate B10 and comes to rest.

Within moments, the aft-right door opens, and in steps Damian Aguilar, a provisioning agent tasked with re-stocking the galley for the next flight. It’s not even noon, but for Aguilar, it’s late in the workday: this is the ninth airplane he’s restocked this morning, and there’s still one more to go after this. Aguilar makes good time as he stashes armfuls of beer, ice, snacks, and soda into their assigned location. He says he can ready an aft galley in less than ten minutes, the smaller forward galley in less than five.

Turning the plane around quickly—getting it back into the air with passengers—has long been part of the Southwest ethos, and it helps to explain why this particular airplane will make five hops today. When the airline started flying in 1971, says company spokesman Dan Landson, “we found that . . . the more time the plane was on the ground, the less we were making money.” In those days, he says, the airline strove for the “10-minute turn”—reducing the time between arrival and departure to only that many minutes.

“That time has increased over the last forty years,” Landson explains. “Obviously, there are more seats on the plane, more people are traveling, there’s more luggage that’s on, there’s more freight that’s loaded on.”  Turn-times now, he says, can be about twenty minutes—but that will likely change soon.

Entering more congested air markets, like New York LaGuardia for example, has impacted the airline’s ability to get in and out quickly, he says. The introduction of the 737-800 to the fleet, which carries more passengers than a 700-series plane like N446WN, has also contributed to the uptick in time. 

Now, to improve its on-time performance, Southwest is extending is typical ground-stop time and redoubling its efforts to make sure flights leave on-time at the beginning of the day. “We’ve found that when the first flights of the day are behind schedule,” says Landson, “you never catch up throughout the rest of the day.”

Flight 1296 has, fortunately, arrived to Chicago well in advance of its scheduled arrival time. Yet even though the flight attendants will be switching planes, they need to remain onboard until they’re relieved by their successors not yet present. Capt. Dunham, however, will be continuing in the cockpit all the way through to Baltimore, still two stops away. During the transition, he performs a quick, pre-flight check of the flight deck controls—it takes this seasoned pro less than a minute, while the more extensive check comes just before pushing back—and examines a weather report in advance of the next leg into Tampa.

Some rough weather stands between our current location and Florida. Mentally picturing his anticipated route on the weather map, Capt. Dunham sees that it will mean turbulence on the way in. He advises the passengers of the anticipated bumps before the plane lifts off, bound with a new cabin crew for the Sunshine State.

Sure enough, it is not long before the clear air beneath the cruising airplane gives way to cloud-cover as Flight 1296 begins its last segments into Tampa over the Gulf of Mexico. It’s sunny on top and 72 degrees and raining hard on the ground, but between cruising altitude and final approach is a stratified series of parallel cloud formations stacked like pancakes, which means shakes, bumps, and seated flight attendants as the airplane passes its 2,800th domestic mile today, just over halfway through the planned 4,850 mile trip.

Touchdown in Tampa is at 4:12 p.m.—twelve minutes past schedule—but the gate is occupied by another plane. The airliner’s second leg doesn’t come to an official end for another twenty minutes, left out to soak under a driving rain. Once it does, the turnaround process commences afresh: new snacks, drinks, a quick wipe-down, and other provisions by Tampa’s ground crew. Forty-one minutes after parking, the plane—now as flight 1385—is on its way to Baltimore.

In the air over Florida, Captain Dunham leads the airplane in a quick ascent through the still-turbulent cloudbank. As before, there’s smooth air above the clouds, but the flight is expected to hit rough air again on the descent into Baltimore. Several anticipatory warnings from the crew caution the passengers to finish their drinks early, and the pilots have asked the flight attendants for word that everyone’s seated so that the plane can start to descend through the chop. The warning proves worthwhile, as Dunham negotiates through several patches of rough air on approach to the DC area.

It is dusk when the plane lands in Baltimore on runway 10 and parks at gate A2. Long before the crowd clears out enough to let aft-seated passengers leave, the ground crew is at work again, servicing the galley for the plane’s next leg. There’s still Islip, N.Y., on the itinerary—and then the final, late-evening flight to West Palm Beach, Fla.

As Capt. Dunham rolls his suitcase from the gate, having handed the reins to another pilot and crew for the 42-minute flight to Long Island, he does so having overseen the completion of over ten hours of passenger service in four separate markets. As for the plane, when it arrives into West Palm Beach at about midnight, it will get to rest for about seven hours—and then take off for Atlanta, Denver, and six cities in California, including Los Angeles twice.  Just another day.

Disclosure: Southwest Airlines Co. provided Airchive.com with airfare, lodging, and two meals during travel. Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren contributed to this report.

SEE ALSO: A Day In The Life Of A Pilot

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Saving fuel is a key concern for airlines, and one of the main reasons United and other carriers have switched over to lighter seats on some aircraft.

Those seats, made by Germany's Recaro, have the extra advantage of being thinner than conventional options, so rows can be closer together and more paying passengers can be packed onboard.

Now, three young French guys have upped the ante with a seat that's nearly three times lighter than Recaro's.

Benjamin Saada, Jean-Charles Samuelian, and Vincent Tejedor created Expliseat in 2011 and have now started selling it. Made from titanium and composites, it weighs just 4 kg (8.8 lbs). The Recaro seats used by United weigh 11 kg.

The difference is enough to cut fuel consumption to the tune of up to $400,000 per plane per year, the company says. If that's right, putting these seats on all 300 of Ryanair's 737-800 jets could save the budget airline about $120 million a year.

The seat, which consists of just 30 parts and is "pre-reclined" by 18 degrees, is designed for use in the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320 family of aircraft. Those are the most popular planes for short- and medium-haul flights and represent a huge market potential.

In March, the European Aviation Safety Agency approved the seat for commercial use. That same month, the startup signed its first customer. It will provide 220 seats for an A321 flown by charter airline Air Méditerranée, according to French newspaper LesEchos.

SEE ALSO: A Day In The Life Of A Southwest 737

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A California teenager managed to stow away for 5 hours in the wheel-well of a Hawaiian Airlines flight from San Jose to Honolulu, and lived to tell about it. 

The boy, who was reportedly "unconscious for most of the flight," was lucky to have survived. More than three quarters of known stowaways who have hid in plane wheel-wells have died, according to USA Today.

Fortunately, such occurrences are exceedingly rare. The Federal Aviation Administration has documented only 105 incidents, including this one, since 1947, USA Today reports.

There are numerous reasons why it's incredibly dangerous to hitch a ride in the wheel-well of a plane.

When an airliner takes off, its cabin and cargo compartments are pressurized and climate-controlled to mimic the oxygen content and air pressure at a very breathable 6,000-8,000 feet above sea level. But the plane's undercarriage is not connected to those systems.

As the aircraft climbs, the temperature outside drops to -63 degrees Fahrenheit at 34,000 feet, and plummets to -81 degrees Fahrenheit at 39,000 feet, according to an FAA study. To put that into perspective, the stowaway on the Hawaiian Airlines flight endured the equivalent of five hours outdoors at the South Pole wearing normal street clothes. But freezing temperatures are not the only danger for stowaways. According to the FAA report, the air at a jetliner's cruising altitude does not contain enough oxygen to support brain consciousness, causing a condition known as Hypoxia. 

"Being in a wheel-well is like all of the sudden being on top of Mount Everest," aviation expert Jeff Wise told CNN. Between oxygen depletion and the cold, "life expectancy is measured in minutes," Wise said. 

Above 20,000 feet, wheel-well stowaways are also at risk for nitrogen gas embolism and decompression sickness (DCS). DCS, also known as "the bends," is most commonly seen in scuba divers and occurs when air bubbles build up in body tissues when there is a sudden lack of ambient pressure. 

Then, of course, there's always the danger of being crushed by the retracting landing gear, or falling out of the wheel-well.Here are a lucky few stowaways who survived after flying in a plane's wheel-well: 

• In August 2013, a teenage boy in Nigeria survived a 35-minute long flight inside a wheel-well. The aircraft did not fly above 25,000 feet.
• In 2010, according to the BBC, a 20-year-old Romanian man survived a 2-hour long flight from Vienna to London Heathrow. Again, the plane did not climb above 25,000 ft. 
• In 2000, a man made it through a 7.5-hour flight from Tahiti to Los Angeles. 
• In June 1993, a 13-year-old boy stowed away onboard a 4-hour flight from Bogota, Colombia to Miami. The flight reach altitudes as high as 35,000 feet. 
• In November 1986, a 35-year-old man stowed away in the wheel-well ofa flight from Panama to Miami. Extraordinarily, the man survived the 3-hour flight at altitudes as high as 39,000 feet.

SEE ALSO: Here's An Awesome Video Of Fighter Jets Streaking Through Mountains

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Air France's new "La Premiere" luxury suite is the latest contender in the ongoing battle for luxury supremacy in the skies.

The new luxury suites will be available for the first time this September onboard Air France's Boeing 777-300 fleet. Though it may not be as palatial as some first-class suites found on Airbus super jumbos,"La Premiere" still represents Air France's boldest move yet to impart French luxury in international travel. 

"Our new La Premiere suite, from among all our new products and services, is the one that best represents our commitment to service excellence and a French travel experience," said Air France chairman and CEO Frederic Gagey. The 32-square-foot La Premiere luxury suites will be located in an exclusive cabin, with access restricted to suite passengers. Air France will install a total of 76 suites on 19 Boeing 777s used primarily for intercontinental or transoceanic routes.

Each suite will feature tweed-patterned fabrics and leather headrests emblazoned with the airline's winged seahorse logo. Suite passengers will have access to a full complement of entertainment options in 12 languages accessed through a 24-inch HD touchscreen display. The fully adjustable seats will also have massage functions. Dining options come courtesy of Michelin-starred chefs, including Joel Robuchon, Regis Marcon, Guy Martin, and Michel Roth. Passengers will also have their choice from a wine list that is updated every two months. All meals will be served over Bernardaud-designed porcelain china, beveled glasses, and Christofle flatware. At night, the adjustable seat will reconfigure into a 6.5-foot-long lay-flat bed. To mimic the relaxing feel of a Parisian hotel room, pillows and bedding for La Premiere passengers will be courtesy of Sofitel.For increased privacy, all suites feature fully retractable dividers and thick curtains.

SEE ALSO: Take A Look Inside Boeing's Futuristic New Space Capsule

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Three-time Formula One World Champion Niki Lauda shot to stardom in the 1970s as Ferrari's domineering tactical genius. 

His racing career was even chronicled by Hollywood in Ron Howard's Golden Globe-nominated film "Rush."

However, what most people don't realize is that Lauda has started not one, but two successful airlines. 

In 1979, the outspoken Austrian founded Lauda Air while on hiatus from his Formula One career. From its founding until its merger with Austrian Airlines in 2000, Lauda Air was a successful charter airline operating a fleet of Boeing 737, 767 and 777 jets.

In 2003, three years after leaving his first airline, Lauda founded his second airline, Niki. The Austrian polymath served as the chief executive of his profitable low-cost carrier until selling out to Air Berlin in 2011. 

In a recent interview with F1 Magazine, the now non-executive chairman of Mercedes AMG Formula One Team gave his insight into the state of the airline industry.

Here are some of the biggest business mistakes airlines are making, according to Lauda:

1. Airlines forgot about the importance of passengers

According to Lauda, the biggest mistake large airlines make is that, in many instances, they neglect their greatest asset: their passengers. "This is what the big airlines sometimes forget," Lauda told F1 Magazine, "They are too preoccupied with cutting down costs and fighting back and forth with unions that they forget about the passengers."  

For Lauda, an airline's strategy should be to create return business from customers by generating goodwill through high quality service at a competitive price. 

Sadly, over the past decade, the pervading trend for airlines have been to cut complementary services and increase the number of seats per-row for economy fliers. In fact, United, American, and Delta have all announced changes that would effectively gut the frequent flyer programs that keep customers loyal to an airline. 2. Airlines implement rigid business strategies that can't cope with economic downturns

According to Lauda, airlines need flexibility to control the cost of labor and acquisition cost of new airplanes.

"When I started Niki, we cut out alot of things like unions and negotiated with with Airbus to get cheaper airplanes," said Lauda. "I joined forces with Air Berlin because of their sales power to [help sell tickets]." 

Since any significant shift in business strategy take two to three years to implement, airlines need to design strategies that afford them room for adjustments during a downturn in the economy. A failure to do so could lead them to suffer the same fate as airlines like Qantas, which announced earlier this year that it had lost $252 million in the previous 6 months. 3. Airlines merge without concern for differing corporate cultures.

According to Lauda, one mistake he will never make is again is to merge two airlines without taking into account the differences in corporate culture. The entrepreneur merged his first company with the larger Austrian Airlines in a deal that would eventually destroy the Lauda Air brand. Lauda left the merged airline soon after the deal, deciding that Austrian Airlines' differing corporate culture had overrun his company. By 2013, the Lauda Air name had disappeared completely from the skies after the Austrian Airlines Group retired the brand. 

Lauda wasn't the only one to make this mistake. United Airlines and Continental has struggled mightily to make their 2010 merger succeed. Four years after the merger, United-Continental is still operating essentially as two separate airlines; each flying the same aircraft and routes they did pre-merger. While American and Delta have posted profits in 2014, United lost $609 million over the first three months of the year.

SEE ALSO: Air France Reveals Incredible Private 'Suites' With Massage Seats And Hotel Linens

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While electric vehicles are gaining popularity in the automotive world, the aviation industry is also looking into ways to clean up its act.

French firm Airbus is best known for its large passenger jets—including the double-deck Airbus A380—but its latest project is rather smaller.

The E-FAN is a small experimental aircraft, powered entirely by electricity.

It's small, much quieter than a typical combustion-engined light aircraft, and could cut the cost of an hour-long flight from around $55 to just $16—so it has the same economic benefits as its electric road-going cousins.

According to Inhabitat, it uses 120 lithium-ion polymer battery cells. These are stored in the wings, freeing up space in the cabin, while propulsion is handled by two electric ducted fans mounted either side of the tail.

Each of these develops around 30 kilowatts, so the aircraft's combined power output is around 80 horsepower--enough for a 136 mph top speed.

MORE: Fun For $40,000? Electric Plane Beats Electric Car Every Time...

Endurance is currently around 30 minutes, but Airbus hopes to extend that to over an hour. That will limit it to shorter flights for the time being, but even light aircraft can cover quite a distance without traffic to encumber them, so that's not as bad as it sounds.

Airbus intends to expand the E-FAN's development into 2.0 and 4.0-generation aircraft, the latter using a hybrid system. The eventual aim is to expand electric power into wider commercial flight—curtailing the sector's sizeable emissions contribution.

Airbus has released a video detailing some of the aircraft's design and construction.

It's certainly an interesting development and a striking aircraft, but we've already discovered one problem with future electric aviation.

With aircraft so quiet, companies insist on overlaying the wonderful silence of electric flight videos with annoying background music...

SEE ALSO: A British Airline Wants To Use Drones To Repair Its Airplanes

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The Federal Aviation Administration investigated an incident last month involving a drone that nearly collided with a commercial airliner in U.S. airspace, but wasn’t able to identify who was flying the unmanned aircraft or what type of plane it was.

The near-miss took place on March 22 outside Tallahassee, Florida. A U.S. Airways commuter flight operated by PSA Airlines traveling from Charlotte, North Carolina, was on an approach about five miles northwest of a runway at Tallahassee airport 2,300 feet above ground when it “passed an unreported and apparently remotely controlled aircraft,” according to a statement from an FAA spokesman.

The commercial pilot reported the “near mid-air collision” to air traffic control and the agency investigated the incident, but “neither the UAS nor the pilot could be identified,” it stated, referring to the acronym for unmanned aerial system.

Indeed, the commercial pilot — whose identity hasn’t been disclosed — initially thought the two aircraft had collided, but an inspection of the airliner afterward found no damage, according to an article by Jack Nicas of The Wall Street Journal.

Jim Williams, who manages the unmanned-aircraft office at the FAA, disclosed the incident on May 8 during a drone conference in San Francisco, and it’s believed to be the first case of a large commercial passenger jet almost striking a drone, according to the article.

The news report said the pilot described the craft as “as a camouflaged F-4 fixed-wing aircraft that was quite small.” The FAA spokesman said some media reports have speculated whether the aircraft was actually a QF-4 unmanned aerial target flown by the Air Force from Tyndall Air Force Base outside Panama City.

But a Defense Department spokesman told the Journal that “most military drones aren’t painted with camouflage” and the FAA spokesman said it would be highly unlikely for a military aircraft from Tyndall to find itself in the landing approach of a passenger jet at Tallahassee.

Manned aircraft are required to fly at least 1,000 feet apart vertically and several miles apart laterally, and remote-controlled aircraft are supposed to be operated below 400 feet, according to the article.

The incident comes as the FAA is crafting guidelines for integrating unmanned systems into the national airspace by 2015. The spokesman said he wasn’t aware of any impacts the incident may have caused to the agency’s rule-writing efforts.

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The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still doesn't know the identity of a pilot of a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that nearly collided with a commercial flight over Tallahassee, Florida, on March 22 — or even the model of the UAV itself, Military.com has reported.

The FAA has the difficult task of regulating almost the entirety of America's highly complex airspace, and the proliferation of domestic UAVs, which have been used for everything from photography to policing the U.S.-Mexican border, only makes their job harder. Still, this was the first known near-miss between a commercial plane and a UAV over U.S. airspace.

So why do regulators know so little known about the incident?

It's possible the UAV was a sophisticated remote-control hobby aircraft. "We interviewed the captain," FAA spokesperson Les Dorr told Business Insider, "and he was adamant that it was a small aircraft, that it looked like an F-4 [Phantom], and that it wasn’t a helicopter or quad-copter."

The FAA has guidelines regarding the operation of remote-control hobby aircraft. The UAV's pilot might not even have known about the near-miss or maybe doesn't want to come forward out of fear of the potential consequences. With no apparent logs or radar of the UAV's flight, and only the airline pilot's description to go off of, we may never know the truth of what was nearly a grim landmark incident in U.S. civil aviation. It would have been "catastrophic" had the two aircraft collided, according to a top FAA official.

One possibility is that the UAV originated at nearby Tyndall Air Force Base, outside of Panama City, Florida. This is a viable theory because the near-miss took place at higher altitude than most hobby planes fly, and an F-4 Phantom looks a bit like a type of drone that's used at Tyndall.

Typically, the FAA would coordinate with domestic UAV operators, including the U.S. military, to avoid situations like the one on March 22. The FAA issues what's called a Certificate of Authorization (COA) that requires coordination with air traffic control prior to any operation of a UAV, and the agency limits operators to certain locations and altitudes.

"Unmanned aerial systems can’t be operated in the national airspace without some type of authorization from the FAA,"aviation law expert Gregory Winton told Business Insider. "I have a hard time believing that a public-use aircraft would have been operated by the U.S. government without a COA, and if it was, the FAA should have known about it."

If it turns out the UAV wasn't a hobby plane, this incident would reveal a troubling lack of coordination between the FAA and the military. 

In a future where UAVs are easy to fly and obtain, there could be plenty of businesses, individuals, or even criminal enterprises flying without FAA approval. The March 22 near-hit is still shrouded in mystery — but even if it was the result of an errant military drone, events like it could become increasingly familiar.

SEE ALSO: The mystery of a passenger plane's near-miss with a drone

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