Flying Tigers Contract: How America Hired Mercenaries in 1941
On paper, the men who flew for the American Volunteer Group in 1941 were carpenters, musicians, bankers, students and clergymen. One was a stonemason. Claire Chennault, the man who commanded them, travelled on a passport that described him as a farmer. None of it was...
Shark Mouth Nose Art: Who Painted It First, and Why It Stuck
In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been painted, and the...
Joby Flies a Cessna Caravan 3,199 Miles With Zero Pilot Input
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 landed on the...
Navigators and Flight Engineers: How Cockpits Went From Five to Two
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 navigator. His job...
Germany’s First F-35A Handed Over at Fort Worth
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 formally handed it to...
Aeroflot Orders 90 More MC-21s Before the First One Enters Service
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 MC-21s currently...
Blackbeard Goes Into Production: 444 Rounds and an Air Force Cheque
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 services, two budgets,...
The Mechanic Who Took Off in a Sabre and Had to Land It
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 pulled it into the...
Etihad’s Last Stored A380 Flies Home After Six Years at Tarbes
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, every surviving...
Anduril Joins the Air Force VOLARE Contract to Design Jets in Software
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, which unpacks into...
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