Share this story For twenty years, the way NATO moved something too big for its own aeroplanes was to ring a Ukrainian company and a Russian one. That sentence has aged badly, and the arrangement behind it is one of the stranger things the post-Cold-War world...
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Share this story You have heard the claim. The A-10’s gun is so powerful that firing it stops the aeroplane in mid-air. It does not. A burst costs the aircraft a few miles an hour in level flight. But the claim keeps circulating because the real numbers are almost as...
Share this story The story of Arnhem is usually told from the ground: the bridge, the perimeter, the nine days, the evacuation across the Rhine on the night of 25 September. There is another version of it that happens at 900 feet, in unarmed transport aircraft, flown...
Share this story The line abreast loop is not a difficult manoeuvre for four good pilots. You climb several thousand feet side by side, pull over the top in a slow inside loop, and come down the back of it at over four hundred miles an hour. Then you level off at...
Share this story Spangdahlem sits on a hilltop in the Eifel, thirty kilometres north of Trier, in country that is green and quiet and mostly sheep. It exists because in 1951 somebody drew a line at the Rhine and decided that American fighters needed to be west of it....
Share this story There is a moment on the approach to Narsarsuaq where the decision stops being yours. You have turned into the fjord. The water is below, the rock is on both sides, and the channel is too narrow and the walls too high to turn around in. The only way...
Share this story Air Canada launched Vancouver to Singapore in April 2024 with the language airlines use when they mean it: strategic expansion, preferred North American gateway to Asia, the only nonstop between the two countries. Two years and nine months later, it...
Share this story Qantas has been trying to fly from Sydney to New York without stopping for roughly as long as the route has existed. On Wednesday it put a date on it: mid-2028. The airline confirmed that Sydney to New York will be the second route in Project Sunrise,...
Share this story Continue for the runway. Four words, issued thousands of times a day at airports all over the United States, and on 15 September at Newark they put a 300-tonne airliner on an active runway that nobody had cleared it to enter. The aircraft was a...
Share this story Four guidons were rolled and cased at Davis-Monthan on Friday. That is how the Air Force ends things: a flag wound around its staff, slid into a canvas sleeve, and a unit that existed on Thursday does not exist on Saturday. The 355th Operations Group,...
Share this story There is a photograph from Kangerlussuaq on 16 September that does more work than any communiqué. Two Danish F-35As, four American F-16s and two Canadian CF-18s, parked together on a single strip of asphalt at the head of a Greenland fjord. The Royal...
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