Travel

Extraordinary footage has emerged of a Monarch aircraft pitching and tipping dramatically as it comes into land at Gibraltar airport. The clip, uploaded to the internet on Monday, shows the aircraft approaching at a steady angle – then violently rocking as it comes closer to the runway. The aircraft then tips forward violently as heavy gusts batter it. With just 30 feet or so separating the aircraft from the runway the plane suddenly tips sideways, but the pilot quickly straightens it out and makes a safe landing.

US Restaurants have started to serving live animals like octopus, joining a long list of cruel food practices like drowned bird and boiled rat. Here are some of the worst offenders globally. Pictured clockwise from top left: Newborn rodents dipped in boiling oil and eaten live, an octopus dismembered in a restaurant, a live fish on a plate, a diner chooses a live fish to eat from a bucket, frog sashimi and the ortolan, which is drowned in brandy.

The Chilean port city of Iquique is bordered on one side by an enormous 2.5 mile-long sand dune, known as 'The Dragon'. It is the largest urban sand dune in the world. From its peak, the dune slowly edges down into a Pacific Ocean beach. Its unique geographical location makes it the largest urban sand dune in the world.

National Geographic Traveler has released its 2017 list of the hottest cities and the best places to visit for nature and culture in the world. Canada’s epic wilderness, Hawaii’s Jurassic World splendour and Finland’s unspoiled beauty have been highlighted among 21 of the top destinations to explore next year.  Pictured clockwise from top left: Via Dinarica, Western Balkans, Banff, Alberta, Canada, Hamburg, Germany,Mexico's Baja California and inset, Switzerland’s Canton Uri.

A thrillseeker has captured the terrifying moment he and a friend clambered over a hotel railing to scale a rooftop (top left and right) and leap into the swimming pool below (bottom left and right). The mysterious jumper, who goes by the name of 8Booth frequently posts videos of his shocking stunts online and has a reputation for sparking panic among onlookers. His latest video, named ‘Pool drop 5’ was shot at a hotel in Mexico.

The miserable experience of fumbling for lost boarding passes and endless queueing at airports could finally be a thing of the past, as airports of the future will feature biometric tickets, virtual assistants (top right) and fast molecular security scanners (main). Designs for how airports could look in 25 years have been revealed, including descriptions of what passengers' experiences will be like using technology that is already being trialled and developed. The research shows how check-in - a major source of queues and frustration for travellers - will become an automated doddle by 2040.

The gigantic Emirates aircraft – the world’s biggest passenger plane – was filmed approaching the runway sideways at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. It can be seen moving sideways into the wind as part of a special 'crab' landing technique. A crosswind or 'crab' landing sees an aircraft drifting laterally as it approaches the runway in order to track the runway centerline, thereby enabling the pilot to safely bring the plane to the ground.

MailOnline Travel's Sadie Whitelocks ventured to Guadalupe Island in Mexico to dive with great white sharks and ended up coming within inches of one specimen's razor sharp teeth in the spot where a YouTube shark video recently captured a great white thrashing around inside a dive cage. The six-day trip had the aim of showing the world’s most feared creatures in a different light.

Pictured, top left, wreckage from the TransAsia Airways Flight 235 which crashed into Taiwan's Keelung River in 2015 after the pilot switched off the wrong engine; top right, the remains of Air Florida Flight 90 which crashed into the Potomac River in Washington because the pilots failed to properly de-ice the plane; bottom right, wreckage from the 1977 collision between two Boeing 747s at Tenerife Airport, the result of miscommunication with Air Traffic Control; bottom left, the site of Airblue Flight 202's crash in Pakistan in 2010, after which the pilot was blamed for his 'harsh' treatment pf his co-pilot; and, inset, in 1994, Aeroflot Flight 593 from Moscow to Hong Kong crashed over Siberia after the relief pilot's children took the controls, centre (stock image).

Photographer Enda O Flaherty, based in Ireland's Cork, has spent almost every weekend for the past year exploring the empty ruins of tiny 19th and early 20th century school houses across Ireland. Pictured, clockwise from top left - a cross-embossed book cover at the Gortahose school in Leitrim; a derelict classroom at Mastergeehy school in Kerry; cubicles at Drumlish National School in Longford; a surviving blackboard at Latton National School in Monaghan; and (inset) doodles on the wall of Drumlish, which was founded in 1930.

Overlooking the Dolomites, this terrifying infinity pool is suspended 40 feet above the ground (top right) and has a glass window to give brave bathers the sensation of swimming through the sky (left). The dramatic 82 feet long pool is part of a new extension at Hotel Hubertus, a wellness resort for skiers and hikers in South Tyrol, Italy.

'Skyaking', pictured top left, is just one of the extreme sports you can partake in around the world, and here MailOnline Travel reveals the rest - including bodyboarding down Swiss glaciers, top right, camping on the side of cliffs in Colorado, bottom right, ironing under the sea off the British coast, bottom left, and unicycling on mountains, inset.

A new infographic lists 17 locations from the US to China deemed essential to visit for petrolheads. It lists epic races including the Pikes Peak 'Race To The Clouds', which sees drivers hair up a 14,000ft mountain in the Rockies, and Le Mans in France, where teams race for a staggering 24 hours. Other mindblowing drives on public roads also make the cut, such as cruising the German autobahn system, which only has 'advisory' speed limits and the Guoliang Tunnel in China (bottom left), which weaves perilously in and out of a sheer rock face. There's also the Bonneville Salt Flats (top left), where more land speed records have been broken than anywhere else in the world. Also featured is the Stelvio Pass in Italy (top right) and the Nurburgring (bottom right). 

The Pullman service arrived at Ashford International station in Kent at 7.24am and then took a leisurely 90minute route into London Victoria, through Maidstone East and Swanley, so that the lucky 180 passengers who got to board could enjoy the five-star service and luxury trappings of one of the UK’s most famous antique trains.

As these photos demonstrate, so long as you've got a decent fur coat, the first snow brings with it endless fun, certainly in the case of this frolicking horse, top left, rolling panda in China, top right, lounging polar bear in the Arctic, bottom right, a baby elephant at England's Whipsnade Zoo, bottom left, and a highly enthusiastic canine, inset.

For Harry Potter fans, top centre, a road trip across England and Wales stops at the home used for 4 Privet Drive; a Walking Dead focused drive, bottom left, will take you through America's Georgia, culminating in 'Alexandria', and a Downtown Abbey drive, bottom right, is mapped from Scotland to the base of England. Other examples include a Friends tour of New York, top left, an American west coast Star Trek drive, top right, and an Irish Game of Thrones road trip, bottom centre.

A crumbling pharmacy, rubble-strewn streets and the buckled shell of a burnt-out bar – this town’s scars of war are clear to see. But all is not what it seems. This shocking ghost town is in fact just a film set, created by Russian movie studio Mosfilm for any productions featuring the devastation of World War II. The dilapidated set is so spellbinding that it’s started to attract tourists eager to explore and photograph its deserted streets, including Dmitry Christoprudov , who has produced a haunting set of images.

An acrobatic Swedish man - 'freerunning artist' Marcus Soderberg - has shared footage in which he performs a daring flip from one set of seats to another on a moving train in Stockholm. Freerunning, a discipline otherwise known as 'parkour', is the art of using slick motions to get from one location to another. In the case of Mr Soderberg's manoeuvre - it was a brief top-step flip, which he captioned: 'If you quickly need to change seat. Use your head!'

The Japanese town of Beppu on the island of Kyushu is perpetually shrouded in steam thanks to thousands of hot spring vents that eject over 130,000 tons of scalding water on a daily basis. The cause of this riot of geothermal activity is Japan’s largest active volcano – the 5,200ft-tall Mount Aso, which rumbles away 60 miles to the south west of the town.

The Icelandic Phallological Museum is home to the world's largest collection of penises. It contains an eye-watering 286 specimens carefully collected from 93 different species of animals. Inside the museum's large illuminated rooms there are penises and penile parts of all shapes and sizes from a huge array of mammals, from whales to bears, seals to cats, and even mice. Preserved in formaldehyde inside a huge plexiglass case at the museum's entrance is the phallus of a sperm whale (left). It is 1.70 metres tall (5ft 6in) and weighs 75kg (165lbs).

The images were taken by acclaimed Polish photographer Kacper Kowalski from 500 feet above the earth in a paraglider, during Poland's coldest days. Kowalski, 39, from Gdynia, turns everyday locations into perfectly composed yet abstract images. They are scenes in which human presence is felt but never actually seen. He said that 'for years, my work looked at the complicated relationship between civilization and nature' and that his new project, being showcased in an exhibition called Fade To White in New York's Curator Gallery, 'imagines a time when that struggle is over, when there are no more humans on Earth'.