2015 in aviation

This is a list of aviation-related events in 2015.

Events

January

7 January
10 January
  • The first major piece of wreckage from Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501, a piece of the Airbus A320-216's tail section, is brought to the surface from the bottom of the Java Sea.[1]
12 January
  • A volcanic eruption in Tonga sends ash into the sky, prompting the cancellation of all international flights to and from the country. Flights do not resume until 14 January.[2][3]
  • Divers retrieve the flight data recorder from Indonesia AirAsia Flight 8501's wreckage on the bottom of the Java Sea.[4]
13 January
14 January
18 January
19 January
20 January
26 January
28 January
29 January

February

4 February
  • TransAsia Airways Flight 235, an ATR 72-600 with 58 people on board, experiences an engine flameout just after takeoff from Taipei Songshan Airport in Taipei, Taiwan. After clearing an apartment building, the aircraft rolls sharply to the left at low altitude, and its left wingtip strikes a taxicab on the Huangdong Viaduct and the viaduct's guardrail before it crashes into the Keelung River in Taipei. Among people on the plane, the crash kills at least 35, with another eight missing and all 15 survivors injured. Two people in the taxicab also suffer injuries. Dashcams in several vehicles driving on the viaduct record the crash.
8 February

March

5 March
9 March
10 March
13 March
24 March
27 March
  • After the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, the European Aviation Safety Agency issues a temporary recommendation for airlines to ensure that at least two crew members, including at least one pilot, are in the cockpit at all times of the flight.[21]
29 March
  • Air Canada Flight 624, an Airbus A320-211 (registration C-FTJP) with 138 people on board, lands short of the runway in snow and poor visibility at Halifax International Airport in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It smashes through an antenna array, loses its landing gear, severs the power line that supplies all of the airport's electricity, and slides to a stop on its belly, suffering severe damage. All aboard survive, but 23 people suffer injuries.
30 March
31 March
  • Since 1 January, Airbus has booked gross orders for 121 aircraft, while Boeing has booked 116. However, after cancellations and conversions, Boeing has 110 net orders since 1 January compared with Airbus's 101. Since 1 January, Airbus has delivered 134 aircraft to customers, including one A350 and four A380s.[22]

April

13 April
14 April
  • Asiana Airlines Flight 162, an Airbus A320-200 (registration HL7762) with 82 people on board, loses height on final approach to Hiroshima Airport in Mihara, Japan, strikes an instrument landing system localizer antenna, and skids onto the runway on its tail, spinning 180 degrees before coming to a stop. Its landing gear collapses and it suffers damage to its left wing and left engine. No one is killed, but 20 of the people on board suffer injuries.

May

8 May
9 May
12 May
22 May
28 May

June

2 June
8 June
22 June
30 June

July

1 July
9 July
  • An eruption of Mount Raung in East Java, Indonesia, forces the closure of five airports on Java, Bali, and Lombok through 10 July because of volcanic ash in the atmosphere, greatly disrupting air traffic in the area as flights at the airports are cancelled through late in the day on 10 July. Coming when many Australians travel to Bali on vacation and many Indonesians travel for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, the airport closures strand thousands of travelers.[34]
10 July
  • The Airbus E-Fan X makes a 74 kilometers (46 miles) flight from Lydd, England, to Calais, France, in approximately 37 minutes, flying at an altitude of around 1,000 meters (3,300 feet), becoming the first twin-engine, all-electric plane to cross the English Channel. The flight is made on the same route as that Louis Blériot used made when he made the first crossing of the English Channel in an airplane on 25 July 1909, but in the opposite direction.[35]
29 July
30 July
  • Facebook announces that it will begin testing the full-size version of its Aquila unmanned aerial vehicle later in the year. The 1,000-pound (454-kg) aircraft has a wingspan of 140 feet (43 meters) and is designed to fly for up to 90 days at an altitude of up to 90,000 feet (27,000 meters) and use laser optics to bring Internet connectivity to parts of the world where conventional connectivity is impractical.[38][39]
31 July

August

4 August
5 August
6 August
11 August
16 August
20 August
  • Two Let L-410 Turbolet aircraft carrying parachutists rehearsing for a nearby air show collide over Červený Kameň, Slovakia, at an altitude of about 5,000 feet (1,500 meters) and crash. The accident kills seven people – two crewmembers aboard each plane and three parachutists aboard one of them – but the other 31 people aboard the two planes parachute to safety. Five of them are treated for injuries. One of the dead crew members is former Slovak ice hockey player Michal Česnek.
22 August

September

3 September
5 September
8 September
15 September
23 September

October

1 October>
2 October
13 October
  • The Dutch Safety Board releases its report on the crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014, in which it concludes that a Russian-made Buk surface-to-air missile brought the Boeing 777 down, blowing its cockpit off and causing it to break up in mid-air over Ukraine before crashing. It adds that the aircraft should not have flown over the war zone in eastern Ukraine, but also notes that 160 other aircraft did so safely on the day Flight 17 was shot down. Although the report does not attempt to determine who shot the airliner down, the Russian government dismisses it as biased and the result of "political orders" to reach the conclusion that it did.[56]
17 October
25 October
  • The bankrupt Russian airline Transaero goes out of business.
29 October
31 October

November

1 November
4 November
10 November
21 November
22 November
23 November
  • The search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, a Boeing 777 missing since March 2014, shifts to a remote part of the Indian Ocean southwest of Australia where an experienced British Boeing 777 captain, Simon Hardy, estimates that it may have made a controlled water landing and sunk largely intact. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau reports that the shift is occurring because of improved Southern Hemisphere spring weather in a 120,000-square-kilometer (46,000-square-mile) priority search area rather than because of Hardy's analysis. Although a flaperon from Flight 370 found in July 2015 washed up on a beach on Réunion was from Flight 370, the search for Flight 370 on the Indian Ocean floor, taking place more than 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off the Australian coast since October 2014, has covered 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) without finding any trace of the airliner.[66]
24 November
29 November
  • The last Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, intended for delivery to the United Arab Emirates Air Force in 2017, takes off from the Boeing assembly plant at Long Beach, California, conducting a flyover of the facility before departing. Boeing, which delivered the U.S. Air Force's last C-17 in September 2013, plans to close the Long Beach plant by the end of 2015 – except for small sections left open for one to two more years to provide engineering support for C-17s – because of insufficient foreign orders for the C-17 to justify keeping the assembly line open.[67]

December

22 December
30 December

First flights

February

March

April

May

June

July

September

October

November

December

Entered service

Retirements

Deadliest crash

The deadliest crash of this year was Metrojet Flight 9268, an Airbus A321 which was destroyed by a terrorist bomb in the Sinai peninsula of Egypt on 31 October, killing all 224 people on board.

References

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