Airline Cockpit Pitot Tube 
Aerotime
JUNE 23, 2025
A SriLankan Airlines Airbus A320 suffered multiple failures of key flight instruments during a recent flight from Colombo to Singapore but managed to make an emergency landing in Medan after declaring a mayday to air traffic controllers. Aircraft are fitted with pitot tubes to assist in providing air speed data to the pilots.
Aerotime
APRIL 3, 2025
Even the most automated aircraft, such as the Airbus A350, the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and the F-35 military jet, come with such instruments fitted as standard should an electrical failure affect the more modern cockpit display screens. These three levels of control are ascending in their level of aircraft control and capability.
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Plane and Pilot
MAY 31, 2025
Suddenly, one of the Airbus three redundant pitot tubes clogged with ice crystals. While some wreckage was recovered within days, it took nearly two years to retrieve the flight and cockpit voice recorders from the ocean floor. In the airline world a one-head-down, one-head-up philosophy divides the workload.
Pilot Institute
JULY 11, 2025
That’s the speed your airspeed indicator shows based on ram air pressure in the pitot tube. For example, an airliner might indicate only 250 knots at 35,000 feet, but its true airspeed could be over 430 knots. Commercial airliners aren’t designed for supersonic flight. Safety is also a factor.
Flying Magazine
JUNE 27, 2025
Subscribe Now So, once we’ve accepted driverless cars, what about pilotless airliners? When people argue against pilotless airliners, they invariably bring up the MacGyver element that the alert, creative human mind brings to problems. A deadheading pilot named Dennis Fitch came up to the cockpit to help.
Fear of Landing
MAY 9, 2025
The most recent case, when Singapore Airlines flight SQ321 experienced extreme turbulence in May 2024, led to thirty passengers injured and one death by a passenger who suffered a heart attack. Before that, the most recent turbulence-related passenger flight with a fatality in the NTSB database was United Airlines flight 826 in 1997.
Flying Magazine
JULY 11, 2025
I was inspired by Ernest Gantt’s seminal work, Fate Is the Hunter , which chronicles his adventures of flying the line when round-engined DC-2s, -3s, -4s, -6s, Boeing 307s, and Lockheed Constellations were the primary people movers during the golden age of airliners. Gantt would not have been impressed.
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