Edelweiss A340 HB-JMC: Gear Fault Turns Punta Cana Flight Back
Share this story Ten minutes out of Zurich, a fully fuelled Airbus A340 bound for the Caribbean stops climbing and starts drawing circles in the sky north of Aarau. Somewhere beneath the fuselage, one set of wheels has refused to fold away. For the crew of Edelweiss...
Saudi AH-6i Helicopter Crash in Najran: Two Officers Killed
Share this story Two Saudi officers are dead, and there are two versions of how they died. In one, their small attack helicopter suffered a technical failure and fell out of the sky near the Yemeni border. In the other, a Houthi weapon brought it down. On Sunday 18...
Lithuania Drone Incident: Suspected Drone Explodes, Not Shot Down
Share this story Somewhere over northern Lithuania, early on Sunday morning, something exploded. A driver on the road from Biržai toward Pasvalys heard the bang, and debris struck the door of a moving car. Nobody was hurt, but air raid alerts had sent people across...
Romanian F-16s Shoot Down Two Geran Jet Drones Off Sulina
Share this story The sun was going down over the Danube Delta when the radar picture filled with targets. A group of aircraft was moving southwest across the Black Sea, about 120 kilometres east of Snake Island, on a course that pointed straight at the Romanian coast....
FAA 1,500-Hour Rule: How US Airline Pilots Actually Get Hired
Share this story Ask anyone in American aviation how you get hired by an airline and you will be given a number. Fifteen hundred hours. It is the single best-known figure in the industry, it is quoted as though it were a law of physics, and almost every part of it is...
Part 103 Ultralight Helicopters: The 254-Pound Problem
Share this story There is a helicopter you can buy, fly away from your own field, and operate in American airspace without a pilot certificate, without a medical, without registration, and without any airworthiness approval whatsoever. It is not a loophole and it is...
Neel Kearby: Six Kills Over Wewak and the Medal of Honor
Share this story Neel Kearby was the man who proved the P-47 Thunderbolt could fight in the Pacific. Many pilots there thought the heavy fighter was hopeless against nimble Japanese aircraft. Kearby, commander of the 348th Fighter Group, worked out how to use its...
F-35 Sensor Fusion: How Three Sensors Become One Track
Share this story A fighter pilot looks down at the display and sees a symbol. One symbol, in one place, with a speed, a heading and a label saying what it is and whose side it is on. Behind that single symbol, several entirely different machines have reported entirely...
FAR Part 103: The Aircraft You Can Fly With No License
Share this story Almost everything that flies in the United States is wrapped in paperwork. A certificate for the pilot. A medical for the pilot. A registration for the aeroplane. An airworthiness certificate for the aeroplane, and an annual inspection to keep it....
Short Sperrin: Britain’s Insurance-Policy Nuclear Bomber
Share this story Everyone remembers Britain’s three V-bombers: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan and the Handley Page Victor. Almost nobody remembers the fourth. It had straight wings, engines stacked one on top of the other, and a job description that...
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