Share this story Somewhere over Russia today, a man is lying on his stomach in the nose of a jet transport, looking straight down at the ground through a wall of flat glass panes, with nothing between him and the landscape but a few millimetres of window. He is a...
Share this story On Thursday in Moscow, Aeroflot signed for 90 more Yakovlev MC-21-310s. That takes the national carrier’s commitment to 108 aircraft, with deliveries running from 2029 to 2032, plus simulators, crew training and 22 years of support. The number of...
Share this story On the night of 20 September 1956, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona took an F-86F Sabre down the runway for a high-speed taxi test, felt the nose go light at 105 knots, decided he no longer had room to stop, and...
Share this story At half past nine on Thursday morning, an Airbus A380 that had not moved under its own power in nearly six years lined up at Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées and went to Abu Dhabi. A6-APB was the last one. When it re-enters commercial service,...
Share this story 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...
Share this story 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...
Share this story 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...
Share this story In 1941 the US Army Air Forces asked a sensible question. What if aluminium ran short, and what if the enemy could be fought with something small, cheap and made of wood? Bell answered with the XP-77: a fighter the size of a racing aeroplane, built...
Share this story Seventy-nine years ago today, the United States stopped treating air power as something the Army did on the side. On 18 September 1947 the National Security Act came into force and the United States Air Force became a service in its own right, with...
Share this story On 18 November 1947 a test pilot took off from San Diego in a car with an aeroplane bolted to the roof, and discovered somewhere over the mud flats that he had almost no aviation fuel on board. He had checked the fuel gauge before departure. It was...
Share this story Airlines are not short of passengers. They are short of cheap fuel, and the first thing that breaks is the flight that was only ever marginally worth operating. At the Morgan Stanley Laguna Conference on 16 September, American Airlines chief executive...
Share this story 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...
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