Hüfifirn: A Swiss Glacier Gives Back a Plane Lost in 1963
Share this story A walker in the Swiss canton of Uri came across something metallic lying on the ice near the Hüfifirn glacier and called the police. The police called the accident investigators. The investigators confirmed it was light alloy from an aircraft....
Vietravel Airlines Signs a Letter of Intent for 50 Airbus Jets
Share this story Vietravel Airlines has been building its own fleet for about fifteen months. It owns a small handful of Airbus A321s. Its international network consists of two routes. On 10 September 2026, in the Salon at the Élysée Palace and in front...
REGENT Viceroy: The Electric Seaglider That Flies as a Boat
Share this story On 2 September 2026, a large white machine with twelve propellers lifted off the surface of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, climbed to ten metres, flew 596 metres in about thirty seconds, and settled back onto the water. Two people were on board....
HT-100 NAVAL: Angola Gets Six Swiss-Built Robot Helicopters
Share this story In the last week of August, in a village in the Swiss canton of Glarus, a small grey helicopter with no one inside it lifted off, flew a profile, and landed again. It did this five more times, in six different airframes. Painted on the side of each...
Boeing 747 G-ONEE: An Open Door in the Rain Cost All Airspeed
Share this story Nothing about the night looked like the start of an emergency. On the ramp at London Heathrow, a One Air Boeing 747 freighter sat with its left forward passenger door — the L1 door — standing open, because the engineers changing its smoke...
UMPK Glide Bombs: Russia Dropped a Reported 8,766 in August
Share this story Somewhere over the Luhansk region, a Russian Su-34 Fullback pulls into a shallow climb at around 12,000 metres, holds it for a few seconds, and lets go of four objects that look like ordinary bombs wearing borrowed wings. The aircraft never crosses...
Shortest Takeoff Distance: From Valdez STOL Records to Airliners
Share this story Pioneer Field sits at sea level on the edge of Prince William Sound, and every May a steady breeze rolls in off the water. On 12 May 2018 that breeze was blowing 12 to 15 knots straight down the runway when Frank Knapp lined up a yellow, slat-winged...
Fin Markings Decoded: What Air Force Tail Codes Mean
Share this story Stand at the fence at almost any air base and the fin of a fighter will tell you, if you can read it, which country owns the aircraft, which base it lives at, which squadron flies it, which year it was ordered, and occasionally whether the person...
Short SB.5: The Aeroplane Built to Settle an Argument
Share this story In 1949, English Electric wanted to build a supersonic fighter with sixty degrees of wing sweep. Nobody in the world had flown a wing swept that far. The Royal Aircraft Establishment thought it would be uncontrollable at low speed, and said so. There...
Antonov An-71 Madcap: The AWACS With Its Radar on the Fin
Share this story Every airborne early warning aircraft in the world looks broadly the same: a transport or an airliner with an enormous rotating dish balanced on struts above the fuselage. The Hawkeye does it. The Sentry does it. Even GlobalEye, which uses a fixed...
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