Joby Flies a Cessna Caravan 3,199 Miles With Zero Pilot Input
Share this story A single-engine turboprop flew from California to the Atlantic this month, taxied itself, took itself off, found its own way around thunderstorms, slotted into one of the busiest general aviation airports in America without ever having been there, and...
Navigators and Flight Engineers: How Cockpits Went From Five to Two
Share this story Somewhere over Russia today, a man is lying on his stomach in the nose of a jet transport, looking straight down at the ground through a wall of flat glass panes, with nothing between him and the landscape but a few millimetres of window. He is a...
Germany’s First F-35A Handed Over at Fort Worth
Share this story We have watched this particular aeroplane twice already: once when it went into the paint shop in August, and again when it flew for the first time on 10 September. On Friday, Lockheed Martin rolled 35+01 out under the lights at Fort Worth and...
Aeroflot Orders 90 More MC-21s Before the First One Enters Service
Share this story On Thursday in Moscow, Aeroflot signed for 90 more Yakovlev MC-21-310s. That takes the national carrier’s commitment to 108 aircraft, with deliveries running from 2029 to 2032, plus simulators, crew training and 22 years of support. The number of...
Blackbeard Goes Into Production: 444 Rounds and an Air Force Cheque
Share this story Eleven months ago Castelion was a startup with an integration award and a good story. This week the US Navy placed a production order worth up to $200 million, and the Air Force quietly added $16.4 million to a research contract of its own. Two...
The Mechanic Who Took Off in a Sabre and Had to Land It
Share this story On the night of 20 September 1956, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona took an F-86F Sabre down the runway for a high-speed taxi test, felt the nose go light at 105 knots, decided he no longer had room to stop, and...
Etihad’s Last Stored A380 Flies Home After Six Years at Tarbes
Share this story At half past nine on Thursday morning, an Airbus A380 that had not moved under its own power in nearly six years lined up at Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées and went to Abu Dhabi. A6-APB was the last one. When it re-enters commercial service,...
Anduril Joins the Air Force VOLARE Contract to Design Jets in Software
Share this story Anduril has a new Air Force contract, and the headline number is $85 million. The interesting part is everything the headline number leaves out. The Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson has put the company on a programme called VOLARE,...
The C-17 Eats the Runway. The Air Force Weighed How Much
Share this story The reel asks a good question. A C-17 weighs up to 585,000 pounds. It lands on dirt. So how does it stop without hoovering half the runway into four very expensive turbofans? The honest answer is that it does not avoid it. It eats the dirt, and the...
ASELSAN Flies Three EW Pods on Two TB2s and Jams a Live Radar
Share this story Suppressing an air defence system is one of the most expensive things an air force can do. It normally takes a dedicated aircraft, a specialised crew and a weapon that costs more than a house. Over Konya this month, ASELSAN did the first two-thirds of...
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