Moscow Drone Attack: 400 Flights Hit, 30 Jets Diverted
Share this story The fires at the Kapotnya refinery were out by Sunday afternoon. The damage to Russian civil aviation took two more days to count. According to the aviation security firm Osprey, the Ukrainian drone attack on Moscow overnight from 19 to 20 September...
OBOGS Explained: Why Fighter Pilots No Longer Breathe Pure Oxygen
Share this story Ask most people what a fighter pilot breathes and the answer comes back instantly: pure oxygen. It is one of those facts everyone knows, it was broadly true for about forty years, and today it is wrong in two separate directions. Modern fighters...
Newark Ground Stop: One Cut Cable, Eight Hours, Five Airports
Share this story At about ten o’clock on Monday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped Newark Liberty, Teterboro and Philadelphia International. At one in the afternoon it added John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia. Between roughly 09:40 and just after...
Polar Routes: Why Airliners Cross the Arctic but Not Antarctica
Share this story There is a Boeing 757 parked on the Antarctic ice at 79 degrees south. It is white, it has rows of passenger windows, and it got there under its own power on a runway of polished blue ice at Union Glacier, roughly 1,000 kilometres from the South Pole....
Houthi Strikes Called Off: Bombs Were Already on the Jets
Share this story Somewhere inside US Central Command’s area of operations on Sunday, ordnance crews were doing the job that makes a war real: lifting live weapons onto aeroplanes. Then the word came down to stop. President Donald Trump called off a planned...
Beartrap: The Canadian Invention That Put Sea Kings on Destroyers
Share this story The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
Operation Tundra Merlin: An Arctic Kill Chain Off Dutch Harbor
Share this story A hundred nautical miles north of Dutch Harbor is not anywhere. It is grey water, weather that arrives sideways, and the shortest line between the Aleutians and the Russian Far East. This week it has an American and Canadian task force in it, and...
Tehran to Minsk: The VIP MD-87 Route That Lasted Four Flights
Share this story On the departures board at Minsk National Airport, flight ATS6446 from Tehran was listed under a carrier name that told you nothing at all: Private owners. It appeared once. Nobody has said who was on it. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-87...
CT-157 Siskin II: Canada Swaps Snowbird Jets for a Turboprop
Share this story At Gatineau on Thursday morning a single turboprop pulled up over the airport in a ceremonial flypast, and a sixty-year era began its long goodbye. The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-21, built at Stans in central Switzerland. In Canadian service it is the...
Eglin Lost an FLM-136. A Florida Fishing Boat Caught It.
Share this story Captain Daniel Arsenault was running a morning charter out of Pensacola on Saturday when he spotted something floating offshore. He went over for a look, the way you do. Underneath it was a good-size mahi-mahi, which went straight into a cooler...
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