I’m glad to see the back of 2025. Candidly, it wasn’t a particularly good year both personally and, dare I say, writ large either. I’m looking forward to fresh, new calendar pages with which to start the year. My fingers are crossed they’re not too soon besmirched with missteps, misunderstandings, and not-so-near misses on those infernal, eternal New Year’s resolutions I keep meaning to write down. I’m also keeping my fingers crossed humanity can see its way clear to not blow itself into the great beyond in the near future. That’s it: all my hopes and dreams for 2026. On that cheery note …

In this very column at the beginning of 2025, I eschewed most of the standard New Year traditions of rigorous retrospectives of the year gone by and long lists of things-to-do for the year to come. I’m going to stick by that tradition, for the most part, other than to take a quick look back at the 2025 stories BluFly highlighted that you, the reader, found most interesting and engaging. The way to measure this is simple: add up the likes, comments, and reposts on the related social posts and use that total to rank them.

On Bluesky, I’m delighted to report that back in March we posted about an article from the National Air and Space Museum entitled Black Wings: The Life of African American Aviation Pioneer William Powell.2 The original story was actually from 2016, but it’s every bit as relevant as the day it was written. Powell lived an extraordinary, albeit conflict-shortened life; one of which anyone would have been justifiably proud. Suffice it to say, however, his life’s work was made almost infinitely more difficult by the times in which he lived. Powell’s life is well-worth examining and celebrating, and this article constitutes a great start.

The first honourable mention on Bluesky goes to the post featuring Ben Forrest’s article for Vertical Magazine entitled Quebec, BC Aircraft Battle Devastating California Fires,3 documenting the brilliant and brave work of these crews battling the devastating fires in the Los Angeles area that kicked off 2025. Also, our post linking Lufthansa Celebrates Roll-Out of the Legendary Lockheed Super Star4 also proved very popular. By the way, you can access all of these using the footnotes below.

On LinkedIn, we’re proud to say the story that not only won the day on that platform but also took overall top honours, was a story that helped to kick off our Avergreen5 imprint: Under African Skies6 by Jon Davison, a four-part series covering Jon’s air-to-air photography assignment in Tanzania in 2016. The photography and behind the scenes details on how this type of shoot is put together proved to be a popular combination. The aeronautical star of this series was the Pilatus PC-12; the post even managed to attract the attention of the Pilatus factory, which was gratifying to say the least, not to mention propelling the post into the engagement stratosphere.

Speaking of which — the stratosphere, that is — also worthy of an honourable mention is the LinkedIn post highlighting a press release from Sceye entitled Sceye Achieves World’s First Real-Time Methane Detection from the Stratosphere in Partnership with US EPA & State of New Mexico.7 It described Sceye’s diminutive airship doing all this good work at nearly 20,000 metres or, if you prefer, 65,000 feet. Our final LinkedIn honour goes to, not surprisingly, Electra’s press release entitled Four Ways Electra’s Ultra Short Aircraft Will Transform Travel via Direct Aviation.8 We make no secret of our excitement for Electra and this press release provides ample evidence as to why.

That’s it for 2025. The great stories above excepted, please don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Also in this column exactly a year ago in January of 2025, I wrote at some length about the then-nascent Story of the Day (SOTD). Candidly, I’m gobsmacked that this concept is now a year old. Where did the time go? However, setting that aside, it also seems like a good time to tweak the concept a little for the coming year.

Turns out, not every day warrants a SOTD; there are the proverbial slow news days where it’s a struggle to find a story that meets the intentionally high bar used when sharing these stories on BluFly’s social feeds. When these types of days occur, a lot of resources can be expended to find something that comes close to meeting said bar. Frankly, it’s a huge time suck, and it’s really not a good use of highly constrained time and other resources, particularly when it’s at the expense of other work that provides more direct benefit to readers.

Balanced with this are days when a story drops in collective newsroom laps that clears the SOTD bar in street shoes. It’s fun when this happens; there’s a palpable sense of excitement captured with can’t wait ’til folks see this! as the keyboards get pounded putting together the social posts. There have even been days when two – or more? — stories of this calibre show up out of the blue. When this occurs, and assuming their nature is such that a day or two delay won’t matter, the excess stories are simply bumped to the following day, or days, one of which could easily be the one of the dreaded slow news days described above.

With twelve months of SOTD experience under the editorial staff’s belts, here’s what we’re going to do: on days where there just doesn’t seem to be a worthy candidate for SOTD, we’re going to simply leave it at that. No, it won’t get announced in any way; there will simply be no posts bearing the little 🥇 we used to identify SOTD posts. That’s not to say there is not going to be other posts in pursuit of other programs, but rest assured, if the 🥇 doesn’t show up the odd day or two, it’s entirely not by accident.

Faithful BluFly readers may have noticed what must seem like a hodgepodge of rules used for how numbers are presented when embedded in paragraphs of text. Somewhere along the line, I read somewhere it is correct practice to spell out in words any number up to and including one-thousand. Rigorously following this rule made for some hilarious, if not painfully wordy writing, and it’s time to give it some sober second thought. Funnily enough, when I was doing the research for this article, I could find hide nor hair of any evidence of the thousand-word rule. Maybe I dreamt it after a bad meal.

Over the years, I have come to rely on the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) as an excellent arbiter of disputes as to the correct way of formatting formal writing — it’s been around since 1906 and is currently in its 24th edition. That doesn’t make it infallible, of course, but it certainly has stood the test of time, which still counts for something.

So, using CMOS as the guide, here’s the rule BluFly will follow in this regard for the foreseeable future: In nontechnical contexts, Chicago advises spelling out whole numbers from zero through one hundred and certain round multiples of those numbers … as quoted directly from CMOS section 9.2.9

In addition, Chicago also provides a range of lesser rules that kick in to define how to hyphenate the spelled-out versions of numbers, as well as other exceptions to the rule. I won’t bother you with any of these, right now, but they will provide a reference as and when they are required. 🛩️

My curmudgeonly comments that opened this column notwithstanding, I realise for some readers 2025 was not only a good year but perhaps the best year of your life. To you, I apologise in advance for coming off as a wet blanket. Good or bad, Is there anything about the year just concluded or the year ahead you would like to share? I'd love to hear from you.10 Until then, thank you so much for reading and also for engaging with BluFly’s posts on Bluesky and LinkedIn.11

Until we meet again next month, fair winds and blue skies.

Terence C. Gannon
Managing Editor

This is what we managed to put together for you for January, with most recent at the top:

Note that the embedded posts above are from the Bluesky 🛩️ Custom Feed12 which is the reference feed for BluFly.