Philippine Airlines Wants Both: 787s and A350s

Philippine Airlines Wants Both: 787s and A350s

When an airline picks a new long-haul jet, it usually picks a side. Boeing or Airbus. Dreamliner or A350. The engineering, the training, the spare parts, the pilot type-ratings — everything gets simpler when you commit to one family. Philippine Airlines has reportedly...
Boeing Came Out Swinging. Airbus Answered.

Boeing Came Out Swinging. Airbus Answered.

For most of the last five years, the Boeing-versus-Airbus delivery race wasn’t a race at all. Crisis after crisis — the 737 MAX grounding, a pandemic, a factory-quality reckoning after a door plug blew off a jet in flight — left Boeing limping while Airbus...
The Machine That Overrules the Pilot

The Machine That Overrules the Pilot

Just before midnight on 1 July 2002, two aircraft converged over the Bodensee at 36,000 feet. One was a DHL Boeing 757 freighter climbing out of Bergamo with two pilots aboard. The other was a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 carrying 69 people from Moscow toward a...
Engines Turn or Passengers Swim

Engines Turn or Passengers Swim

On the evening of 1 February 1985, a Trans World Airlines Boeing 767 pushed back at Boston’s Logan Airport, bound for Paris. To the passengers it was an ordinary red-eye. It was anything but. Sixteen TWA pilots had been through special training for this route,...
Ford’s Super Hornets Wear Their War Paint

Ford’s Super Hornets Wear Their War Paint

Fighter jets keep diaries. They keep them in stencilled paint, just below the cockpit rail, and if you know how to read them they will tell you exactly what kind of year the crews have had. On the Fourth of July, as the Super Hornets of Carrier Air Wing 8 recovered at...
K2 Airways 737 Vanishes Over the Arabian Sea

K2 Airways 737 Vanishes Over the Arabian Sea

The Boeing 737 freighter working K2 Airways flight 1732 on Tuesday evening was less than an hour from home. It had left Sharjah for Karachi with five crew and a hold full of cargo, a two-hour hop across the Arabian Sea that Pakistani freight operators fly so often it...