"If you’d like to know what goes on beyond the cockpit door so you can better understand go-arounds and take the maneuver in stride like a seasoned traveler rather than as one who doesn’t fly much– read on."

Alain de Botton's thoughts on a world without air travel, sparked by the current lack of flights across much of Europe.

Photos by Robert Harrison from his DIY weather balloon edge-of-space rig.

"Robert Harrison used his ingenuity and a collection of cheap parts worth just £500 to take the spectacular shots using a Canon camera which he launched 35km above the planet's surface."

A bar code that's only good for a million items per airline, apparently, which is less than useful when a big carrier gets through that much in a few days. Of course, this is because baggage tags aren't for you: they're for the airlines, to stop another Lockerbie-style attack. (See BBC Four's excellent Secret Life of the Airport.)

If you liked the first episode of BBC Four's Secret Life of the Airport, or just want to know what Heathrow was like when it was the village of Heath Row, this is probably worth watching.

A very good article which touches new facets of a possibly overfamiliar story, including the fact a Concorde suffered a bird strike, the muscularity of the F-4 phantom, Eric Moody's wonderfully British cabin announcements during a post-flameout 747 glide, and the Airbus 320's use of fly-by-wire. Well worth the read.

"Brooklands was the birthplace of British motorsport and aviation, home of Concorde and the site of many engineering and technological achievements throughout eight decades of the 20th century." Inside the M25 and relatively easy to reach from Waterloo.

James Stewart on a Twitter bot that posts every hour with the number of incoming and outgoing flights from Heathrow. It's a good start, but I'm not sure it's ideally suited to Twitter, and more data would be nice. (Hm, while Gatwick and Stansted are part of BAA then it should be possible to use the same scraping code...)

BBC News pimping their TV shows again, but what a show: this is a video of some of the best bits of Britain from the Air, which will feature visualitions of such things as air traffic, London taxis, ships in the Channel and telephone exchanges.

That title, subtitle and author in full: "Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure: A Gordon". US import, with a quite nice cover.

A review of Naked Airport, as seen on Boris Anthony's Flickr page. Sounds like it could be an interesting book.

It's a good thing I don't fly in Europe much, and that this won't work over the Atlantic. Now, if they'd allowed SMSes only, I'd probably be OK with it.

Leo Hickman on why £75 flights from London to Hong Kong are a really bad idea. Shame about the idiot comments, but then that's what I've come to expect from CiF.

G2 lead about building the A380. One does have to wonder why some of the biggest bits of the aeroplane are built so far from the assembly point, even though it's all very impressive.