Share this story Ten years ago the U.S. Navy had a stealthy, carrier-capable combat drone flying off the deck of a supercarrier — and then it walked away from it. This week the service quietly admitted it wants that aircraft back.On August 31, Naval Air Systems...
Share this story Some stories are too strange to stay in the news cycle. On Friday, the strangest aviation story of the summer becomes a Netflix documentary. The streamer has fast-tracked a film about the afternoon in July when the President of the United States...
Share this story The Strait of Hormuz war widened over the weekend, and for once the most consequential fighting was not over Iran at all. It was over Jordan, where American Patriot batteries spent part of Monday morning shooting down Iranian ballistic missiles aimed...
Share this story Germany spent Tuesday accusing Russia of trying to blow up a Ukrainian freighter on German soil. Russia spent the hours that followed escalating its denial, first through its embassy in Berlin, then through Vladimir Putin himself. The sequence...
Share this story Volodymyr Zelensky spent the first day of September addressing an audience that is not usually on a wartime president’s list: airline schedulers, flight-planning departments and, pointedly, the underwriters who insure them. In a video address on...
Share this story On 5 November 1938 three Royal Air Force bombers took off from Ismailia in Egypt and turned east. Two of them landed at Darwin in northern Australia about forty-eight hours later, having flown roughly 7,150 miles without stopping. It was a world...
Share this story In 1947 Avro proposed a bomber shaped like nothing the Royal Air Force had ever bought: a vast tailless delta with no fuselage worth the name, meant to carry a nuclear weapon at high altitude across a continent. It became the Avro Vulcan. There was a...
Share this story At 3:58 on the afternoon of 29 May 1951, a red P-51 Mustang lifted off from Bardufoss in northern Norway with one man in it and no radio navigation aids ahead of him worth the name. Charles Blair was going to fly over the North Pole to Alaska, alone,...
Share this story On 10 June 1965, a British airliner full of fare-paying passengers came down the approach to a runway and landed without either pilot touching the controls. It was the first automatic landing by a civil airliner in scheduled passenger service, and it...
Share this story Between May and August 1972, an F-4 Phantom pilot from Reidsville, North Carolina was credited with shooting down five MiG-21s over North Vietnam. Every one fell to the AIM-7 Sparrow, a radar-guided missile with a reputation so poor that crews joked...
Share this story At 4:17 in the afternoon on 4 April 1977, a first officer named Lyman Keele said nine words into a cockpit voice recorder that would be played back for decades afterwards. “Bill, you’ve got to find me a highway.” His DC-9 had no...
Share this story At 3:48 in the afternoon on 20 October 1986, two minutes from touchdown at Kuibyshev, the captain of a Soviet airliner asked his flight engineer to pull the curtains across the cockpit windows. The Tupolev Tu-134 had them fitted for training: draw...
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