Jet Airliners Still Navigate With 1920s Radio Tech
An A350 pilot's interactive guide to the radio tech — VOR, DME, NDB, ILS, TCAS — that still guide every flight and take over when GPS is jammed.
James Harding
James Harding: Airline Pilot and Software Engineer
Latest posts
We Got Married!
On 5th May 2026, I married the love of my life, Bruna. A wonderful day shared with a small group of friends and family in London.
Astro, Cloudflare Pages, and Non-Trailing Slash Canonical URLs
A bit of a head-scratcher with Astro and Cloudflare Pages, but I think I've found a solution.
Lava Lamps Are Still Cool
Lava lamps are still cool, and it was a great addition to my man cave.
How Airlines Safely Dispatch Aircraft With Failed Equipment (the MEL)
Airlines fly planes with broken parts every day — legally and safely. The MEL is aviation's feature flag system for hardware, with lessons for software engineers on graceful degradation.
All About Containers - The Physical Edition
I have recently totally overhauled my storage system for *stuff*. From tools to tiny screws, this is the system I settled on.
AirPods Are Apple's Best Product
Simple, reliable, and always in my pocket.
Presence-Aware Room Lighting in Home Assistant
How to set up presence-aware room lighting in Home Assistant with pre-off flashes and day/night scenes, packaged as a reusable YAML blueprint.
Happy Retirement, Dad!
On August 24th 2025, my father Neil Harding had his final flight at British Airways. I was his First Officer, and my brother Ben gave Dad his final landing clearance.
Pilot Logbook Statistics and Visualisations
An explanation of the statistics and visualisations I have created from my pilot logbook data, including 3D globes and lots of interesting charts.
Querying a LogTen Pilot Logbook With SQL
LogTen is a pretty wrapper for a SQLite database. I will explain how to extract data from the SQLite database using SQL.
Split Flap Display
I managed to pick up a beautiful Split Flap display from a company who became bankrupt during COVID. I've been getting up and running again with some custom software!
Build a Simple, Static, Markdown Blog with Flask
A short tutorial explaining how to set up a static Markdown blog in Flask in just a few lines of Python.