F-117 Nighthawk 85-0818: The Smithsonian Gets The Overachiever
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has the 1903 Wright Flyer. It has the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module, a Concorde, a Space Shuttle and an SR-71 Blackbird. What it has never had, in all the years since the aircraft’s existence was...
Amazon Cuts Off 21 Air After the Miami 767 Overrun Killed Five
In commercial aviation, the customer almost never fires the airline. Shippers and carriers are bound together by long contracts, aircraft leases, crew bases and slot allocations, and the whole arrangement is built to survive bad weeks. Investigations take a year or...
Upper Heyford 1992: The F-111 Crew Who Stayed at the Controls
On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon systems officer,...
Squawk Codes Explained: 1200, 7000, 7400 and 7777
Type “what does squawk 7700 mean” into a search box and you get a correct answer in five seconds. Type “what does squawk 2303 mean” and you get a page of confident nonsense. That asymmetry is the most interesting thing about transponder codes....
Angle of Attack and the Stall: Why Wings Stop Working
There is one sentence that, properly understood, prevents a large fraction of fatal loss-of-control accidents. The US Federal Aviation Administration puts it like this: “It is possible to exceed the critical AOA at any airspeed, at any attitude, and at any power...
How Does an Aircraft Fly? Lift, Weight, Thrust and Drag
Almost everyone who has been told how a wing works has been told something wrong. The explanation goes like this: the top of the wing is curved and the bottom is flat, so air going over the top has further to travel, so it must go faster to meet up with the air...
Nimrod: The Airliner That Hunted Submarines for 42 Years
The de Havilland Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and, after three of them came apart in the air, the most notorious. Its reputation never recovered. But the last two unfinished Comet 4C fuselages on the Hawker Siddeley line did not go to scrap. They became...
Su-30MKI: Why the Indian Air Force Flies With Two Crew
Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales. China’s J-20 is...
DARC: The Space Force Picks Texas for Its Last Deep-Space Radar
Geostationary orbit is 36,000 km up, which is far enough that the satellites parked there appear not to move at all. It is where the most valuable military hardware in space lives: communications relays, missile-warning satellites, intelligence platforms. It is also,...
How Much Runway Does a 747 Need? 737, 777 and A380 Compared
Type the question into a search engine and you get a number. A 747 needs 10,000 feet. Or 3,000 metres. Or 8,000 feet. The numbers disagree with each other, none of them cite anything, and all of them are answering a question that does not really exist. There is no...
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