A medium-altitude, long-endurance drone landed on a dirt track that tanks drive down, in the middle of a live-fire range, while a simulated battle was going on around it. Then it took off again and carried on with the mission. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and...
Ukraine says it destroyed six Russian aircraft in one night, on the ground, at an airfield 160 kilometres from the front line. If the claim holds, it is among the heaviest single-night losses Russia has taken at one air base since the invasion began. The target was...
Lufthansa has spent forty years as one of the most reliably Airbus-shaped airlines in Europe. On Wednesday evening its supervisory board signed off on twenty more Boeings — and specifically on the biggest 737 ever built. The Lufthansa Group is exercising options for...
An F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the 149th Fighter Wing of the Texas Air National Guard came down in rural northern Michigan on Thursday afternoon. The pilot ejected and was recovered alive. That last sentence is the story. Everything else is detail. Quick...
In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two requirements. They are two...
On 31 December 1966 the Federal Aviation Administration chose which American company would build the aeroplane that was going to make Concorde obsolete. Lockheed lost. The reasons given were, in effect, that its aircraft was too sensible. The L-2000 was judged simpler...
The decision that saved El Al Flight 219 was not the dive. It was made on the ground at Schiphol, before anyone boarded, and it nearly cost the captain his career. On 6 September 1970 a Boeing 707 left Amsterdam for New York with 138 passengers and 10 crew. Two of...
Hawker Aircraft built the Hurricane, the Typhoon, the Tempest, the Hunter and the Harrier. The name is stamped on some of the most important aeroplanes Britain ever produced. It is not the name of a British aristocrat or an engineer knighted for it. It belonged to a...
Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that offered a different...
On his first day with No. 92 Squadron in May 1940, a twenty-year-old pilot officer borrowed somebody else’s Spitfire and rolled it on take-off. His name was Trevor Wade. Everybody called him Wimpy, after the hamburger-eating character in Popeye. Eleven years...
The Berlin Wall was a month old. The West German federal election was three days away. And two Luftwaffe fighter-bombers were somewhere over Leipzig, in cloud, being hunted by Soviet MiGs, with no idea where they were. Sixty-five years ago this week, on 14 September...
The Boeing 737 MAX spent almost two years grounded worldwide after two crashes killed everybody on board both aircraft. Its reputation has never entirely recovered, whatever the safety record since. The United States Air Force is going to buy one, and put senior...
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