The Jet Flying Boat That Fights Wildfires
Share this story Most water bombers are propeller aircraft, and for good reason: they fly low and slow over fires, scooping and dropping in tight mountain valleys. The Beriev Be-200 does it all on jet power. It skims a lake at nearly 220 km/h, swallows 12 tonnes of...
Kegworth: The Crew Shut Down the Good Engine
Share this story On a freezing January evening in 1989, a nearly new Boeing 737 fell out of the sky less than a kilometre short of the runway and struck the embankment of the M1 motorway. Forty-seven of the 126 people on board died. The cruel twist: the engine that...
The Giant Flying Boat That Fought Fires
Share this story On a warm Sunday afternoon in August 2024, a crimson-and-white flying boat the size of an airliner lifted off a lake on Vancouver Island for the last time. Tens of thousands of people lined the shore. Nine red Snowbirds jets slid into formation...
The White Swan: The Biggest Bomber Ever Built
Share this story A four-engine bomber the length of a swimming pool, painted brilliant white, rolls onto the runway. Its wings are stretched forward like a bird’s. Then four of the most powerful engines ever bolted to a warplane light their afterburners, and...
Ukraine Strikes Russia’s Shahed Sites in Crimea
Share this story Long before a Russian Shahed reaches a Ukrainian city, it has to be stored, fuelled, launched and guided. On the night of August 6–7, Ukraine went after that entire chain at once, striking a drone launch site, an early-warning radar and the...
Etihad Flies the Silk Road to Tashkent
Share this story On August 9, an Etihad Airways Airbus A320 lifted out of Abu Dhabi bound for Tashkent, reopening a link to the old Silk Road — and, with it, an entire country’s worth of onward connections. The new daily nonstop is only half the story....
The Hunt for the Red Arrows’ Next Jet
Share this story For half a century the Red Arrows have signed the British sky in red, white and blue, drawn by nine BAE Hawks flying wingtip to wingtip. This summer the signature was incomplete: worn-out Hawk T1s forced the team to fly seven jets for most of its 2026...
Southwest Turns Burbank Into a Hawaii Gateway
Share this story Hollywood Burbank Airport is the little airport that Angelenos love precisely because it is not LAX. Two terminals, a walk across the tarmac to the stairs, quick hops to Las Vegas and the Bay Area. It is not the sort of place you associate with a...
A Robot Built the Part That Saved This C-17
Share this story A hailstorm, two runaway business jets, and a nose panel that nobody would build. That is the short version of how a U.S. Air Force C-17 ended up grounded for the better part of a year and a half. The long version ends with a robot, a research lab in...
Lilium’s Air Taxis Land in a Museum
Share this story The dream was an electric jet that would whisk you between cities in near silence, lifting off vertically from a rooftop and cruising on stubby wings packed with tiny fans. Lilium, the Munich start-up that raised well over a billion dollars chasing...
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