FAA Waives the 2028 Rule: 35 More Boeing 777Fs Get Through
On 1 January 2028 a rule comes into force that would have killed the Boeing 777 Freighter. Not by banning it from flying, and not by grounding a single existing aircraft. Simply by refusing to issue an airworthiness certificate to a new one. On 16 September the FAA...
Sully Sullenberger on His Alzheimer’s Diagnosis
Chesley Sullenberger has spent the seventeen years since the Hudson being careful about one thing above all: refusing to let the story be about him alone. He has pushed it back towards the crew, the cabin staff, the ferry captains, the training, the system. He is now...
North Korea Shows Its Drone Production Lines, Not Just Its Drones
North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone assembly halls,...
Marines Take EABO Into Combat for the First Time in Epic Fury
The Marine Corps spent six years arguing about Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. Critics called it a PowerPoint concept built for a war with China that might never come. Supporters called it the future. Nobody had done it while being shot at. Then the 31st...
Luxembourg Airport Shut for a Night by Unidentified Drones
Friday evening, around nine o’clock, somebody flew something over Luxembourg Airport that had no business being there. Within minutes the busiest cargo hub in the Grand Duchy had stopped moving aircraft altogether. The suspension lasted through the night. An inbound...
Finland’s First F-35s Land at Rovaniemi, Inside the Arctic Circle
At 17:45 local time on Friday, the wheels of a Finnish F-35A Lightning II touched the runway at Rovaniemi, eight kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, with yellowing birch forest on both sides. A second followed. Finland has been paying for this moment since 2021. It...
Saudi Arabia F-35 Sale: State Department Clears 48 Jets
Saudi Arabia has been asking for the F-35 for years. On Thursday it finally got an answer, and the answer was yes. The US State Department approved a possible sale of 48 F-35 Lightning II fighters to the kingdom, an estimated $24.3 billion package that also covers 49...
Italian Typhoon Hit at Ta’if: Houthi Strike Damages an F-2000
Fighter jets are hardest to kill in the air. On the ground they are aluminium, composite and kerosene, sitting still under a sunshade, and the only thing between them and a warhead is geometry. Overnight on 17 September, at King Fahd Air Base outside Ta’if in western...
Doak VZ-4: The 1958 Tilt-Duct That Predicted the Air Taxi
The landing gear came off a Cessna 182. The seats came out of a P-51 Mustang. The actuators that swivelled the ducts were taken from a T-33. In February 1958 this assembly of other people’s parts hovered, then flew forwards, and in doing so became the first...
Vincent Burnelli: The Man Who Made the Fuselage Fly
Vincent Burnelli spent nearly fifty years arguing that the fuselage of an aeroplane should not be a tube. It should be a wing. He built aircraft that proved it worked. He never sold one in quantity. One survives, sitting outdoors in Connecticut, and it is the last...
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