Delta DL251 Smoke Emergency: A330 Diverts to Porto
Share this story Two hours out of Barcelona, somewhere west of the Iberian coast, the cabin of Delta Air Lines flight DL251 began to fill with smoke. The Airbus A330-300 was bound for Boston with 296 passengers on board. Instead of pressing on across the Atlantic, the...
NORAD Chicago Intercepts: F-16s Flare Planes During Trump Visit
Share this story If you were flying a Cessna over the western suburbs of Chicago on Sunday afternoon without reading your NOTAMs, there is a decent chance an F-16 ended up on your wing. And for at least one pilot, the fighter did not stop at waggling its wings. It...
RAF Fairford Plot: Rubio Blames a ‘Foreign Actor’ as Five Suspects Are Freed on Bail
Share this story It started with a phone call at a quarter to one in the morning. Three vans, apparently heading towards RAF Fairford, the Gloucestershire airfield that has launched American bombers against Iran for most of this year. By dawn on Sunday 27 September,...
Into the Eye of Hurricane Polo: NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters on Video
Share this story A four-engined turboprop lurches, drops and shudders through a wall of grey. Rain hammers the windscreen, the instruments blur, and the flight engineer in the middle seat works the power levers. Then, suddenly, the cockpit fills with light: blue sky...
Monster Fans and a Flying Bathtub: Inside NASA’s Giant Wind Tunnels
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Mayday vs SOS: Why Aviation Needed a Word, Not a Rhythm
Share this story Twice an hour, for three minutes, the North Atlantic fell silent. At a quarter past and a quarter to, every wireless operator on every ship within reach of 500 kilohertz stopped transmitting, pressed his headphones a little harder against his ears,...
The KC-135 That Towed a Crippled F-111 Out of North Vietnam
Share this story “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck by a missile.” The call came over the radio late in the Vietnam War, as a KC-135 Stratotanker crew was finishing a refuelling mission over Southeast Asia and getting ready to turn for home....
Eastern Shuttle Flight 1320: The 1970 Hijacking That Brought Screening to US Airports
Share this story On the evening of 17 March 1970, Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. The Shuttle worked like a bus: no reservations, no security check, and you paid your fare on board once the aircraft was in...
Remove Before Flight: What the Red Tags on Aircraft Really Do
Share this story Walk around any aircraft parked on a ramp and you will see them fluttering in the breeze: long red ribbons printed with three words in white capitals. REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. They hang from pitot tubes, landing gear, engine intakes and ejection seats,...
Spy Planes on Flightradar24: How ADS-B Tracking Exposes the RC-135
Share this story Open a flight-tracking app on almost any day and look at the Black Sea or the Baltic. Among the airliners you will often find something that does not belong: a four-engined jet flying long racetrack patterns off a coastline, or a drone orbiting at...
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