AvTalk - Aviation Podcast · Flightradar24

Beware tall elk and low flying hog hunters

·56 min·2 clips

Colleen Mondor flagged two accidents where a helicopter met an elk and a hog hunter's gun jammed the controls.

The show opens with travel, because that is where the week already is. Ian is in Dallas, and Jason is traveling too, with a first stop in Texas after not being there since around 2019. That leads straight into a first Southwest flight in about 12 years, or at least since the day after the final AirTran flight. The takeaway is pretty simple: it feels like any other airline now. The paid seat assignments and extra legroom are in place, and the most noticeable change is the lack of boarding positions at the gate. In their place is a podium, or really a pole with two tablets, one for group one and one for group two. From there the conversation turns to AirBaltic. A listener had flagged that the carrier expects to have its full A220 fleet available for operations this summer, minus one. The missing aircraft, YL-AAO, was in for maintenance when it suffered a bad fire. The episode says the issue appears to have involved the APU, and that the aircraft was damaged badly enough to be written off. Nearly all of AirBaltic's A220s should be back in operation, which is a relief after years of being, in the hosts' words, royally screwed by Airbus and Pratt & Whitney. Even so, much of the fleet is not always flying for AirBaltic itself. The airline is still building its wet-leasing business, with total capacity expected to rise 15% to 20% this year. That growth is split between a 10% increase in scheduled flying and a 30% to 40% increase in wet-lease flying. The result is that an AirBaltic A220 may turn up on behalf of a lot of different airlines across Europe this summer. The episode then goes back to the FAA and the 787. Another airworthiness directive has been proposed, requiring airlines to inspect their 787s for cracks tied to manufacturing errors related to shim gaps between carbon composite structural components. The hosts treat that as both familiar and absurd, because by now shim gaps on a 787 feel like something that ought to be checked as standard practice. They also wonder whether the issue is concentrated in certain aircraft vintages, which is the kind of question that turns an abstract directive into a real operational problem. The tone stays brisk throughout. Ian and Jason move through corrections, side comments, and dry irritation, with listener input keeping the discussion specific instead of generic. The episode ends up as a compact tour through airline operations, fleet availability, wet-leasing economics, and the maintenance problems sitting behind the headlines. It is not aiming for drama. It is aiming for accuracy.

As heard by us

A brisk airline-news roundtable that makes operational minutiae feel worth tracking.

This episode treats airline news as a chain of operational consequences, not a stack of headlines. Southwest's new boarding setup gets a firsthand reaction, AirBaltic's A220 fleet update includes one aircraft written off after a maintenance fire, and the 787 is back under…

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Why you'd press play

If you want Southwest, AirBaltic, and a 787 headache in one sitting.

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