FAA Designees: DER, DAR and Who Really Signs Off an Aircraft
Share this story Ask who certifies a new airliner in the United States and almost everybody answers: the FAA. It is a reasonable answer. For the overwhelming majority of the individual findings that add up to a certification, it is also wrong. The signature on most...
Buzz Aldrin in MiG Alley: The Sabre Pilot Who Filmed a MiG Pilot Ejecting
Share this story Buzz Aldrin is remembered as the second man on the Moon. Sixteen years earlier, he was a 23-year-old US Air Force lieutenant flying the F-86 Sabre over the north-western corner of North Korea, near the Chinese border, where the MiG-15 came across the...
PMA Parts vs OEM Parts: What the FAA Rules Actually Say
Share this story Open the American aircraft certification rules and search them for the word the whole replacement-parts industry argues about. Type OEM into 14 CFR Part 21, the part that governs how every aircraft, engine and component in the United States is...
Surface-to-Air Missile Explained: How a SAM Hunts an Aircraft
Share this story On the morning of 1 May 1960, Francis Gary Powers was nearly four hours into a flight across the Soviet Union, cruising far above the reach of Soviet fighters, when he heard a dull thump. The aircraft lurched forward, there was a bright orange flash,...
Swept Wings Explained: How Sweep Pushed Jets Toward Mach 1
Share this story In the autumn of 1935, some of the greatest aerodynamicists alive gathered in Rome for the Volta Congress, an international meeting on “High Velocities in Aviation”. Ludwig Prandtl was there, and Theodore von Kármán, and G....
Infrared Search and Track (IRST): How Fighters Hunt by Heat
Share this story Every fighter pilot knows the uneasy moment when the radar warning receiver lights up: someone, somewhere, is looking. Now imagine being tracked with no warning at all. No radar emission to detect, no tone in the headset, nothing for a jammer to...
Turbojet vs Turbofan vs Turboprop: How Jet Engines Differ
Share this story Walk along the apron of a busy airport and you pass three very different-looking machines. A regional airliner with two big propellers. A widebody whose engine intakes are so wide you could almost stand up inside them. And, if you are lucky, a slim...
Short S.23 Empire Flying Boat: The Ocean Liner of the 1930s Skies
Share this story On 3 July 1936, Short Brothers’ chief test pilot John Lankester Parker took a brand-new flying boat out onto the River Medway at Rochester for what was meant to be nothing more than taxi trials. The big silver hull handled so well that Parker...
NA-73X Prototype: The 1940 Plane That Became the P-51 Mustang
Share this story On the morning of 26 October 1940, a bare-metal fighter with no paint and not even a name sat waiting at Mines Field, the small Los Angeles airfield that would one day become LAX. Freelance test pilot Vance Breese climbed in, started the Allison V-12...
Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands: The Carrier Duel That Sank Hornet
Share this story At 06:45 on the morning of 26 October 1942, an American scout pilot north of the Santa Cruz Islands found what every carrier admiral in the Pacific was looking for: the flight decks of Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s main body. Thirteen minutes...
Recent Comments