Quand je serai grand je vais être un magicien qui fume beaucoup

Airbus A330 jet getting struck by lightning in Iceland.

Aircraft get hit all the time by lightning. Sometimes its noticed. Other times we spot it well after the fact. If its not too bad of a strike, usually just a simple check is performed and the a/c is on its way. Totally safe though.

Bats have air plane license

Some study-related and general life tips

Study break ideas

It was a relatively quiet summertime shift in the emergency room at Montreal children’s hospital when the child – an Inuk preschooler – was rushed in on a stretcher. He had been airlifted in from a remote community after a motor vehicle accident, and he was entirely alone. Suddenly he began to cry. We couldn’t speak his language, and couldn’t find a hospital interpreter. Had he developed a sudden headache? Should we rush him to the CT scanner?

While trying to figure out how to proceed, we found someone who spoke Inuktitut, and learned the heartbreaking reason the child was crying: he missed his mother, who had to stay behind, more than 1,500km away.

Hundreds of critically ill children in remote northern communities are flown by ambulance planes to pediatric emergency centres in Montreal or Quebec City every year. And yet the Quebec Aeromedical Evacuations (Évaq, in its French acronym) – the provincial entity responsible for medical air transport – won’t let caregivers join them. Instead, parents must take a commercial flight, often several days later depending on flight schedules, seat availability and weather.

Inuktitut dialect map with labels in Inuktitut inuujingajut or local Roman alphabet. Data from various sources.