The Three-Engine Jet That America Forgot
Count the engines. Most jets have two, or four. The Martin XB-51 had three — two slung under the nose in pods, and a third buried in the tail, breathing through an intake at the base of the fin. It is one of the strangest combat aircraft the United States ever...
Alaska and Hawaiian Hit 150 Starlink Jets
The Wi-Fi on your next Alaska or Hawaiian flight may now be faster than the connection in your living room. Alaska Air Group says roughly 150 of its aircraft are flying with SpaceX’s Starlink internet — and for a lot of passengers, it is free.The group...
The Greyhound Flies Its Last Carrier Landing
For sixty years, one of the most welcome sounds on an American aircraft carrier was not a fighter. It was the drone of two big turboprops on approach. The C-2 Greyhound brought the mail, the spare parts, the fresh food, and the sailors heading home on leave. On 25...
Two Drones, Two New York Airports, One Week
United Flight 1513, a Boeing 737-700 inbound from Key West with 106 people on board, is on final approach to Newark Liberty on a Friday afternoon when the crew sees a small circular object — perhaps three feet across — flash past about a hundred feet...
The Call-Sign Mix-Up That Stopped Flight 308
It is just after six o’clock on a Saturday evening at Miami International Airport. American Airlines Flight 308, an Airbus A319 loaded with passengers bound for Bermuda, has been cleared onto Runway 8 and is beginning to roll. Then the crew sees something that...
The WW2 Lesson Russia Is About to Learn: When the Fuel Runs Out, the War Stops
RAND analysis argues that oil shortages alone can grind Russia’s war machine to a halt — just as strikes on fuel infrastructure crippled Nazi Germany in the Second World War. An army that runs out of fuel cannot keep fighting.Michael Bohnert — Analyst, RAND...
500 Drones in a Shipping Container: The Pentagon’s Race to Master Swarm Warfare
The Pentagon wants 500 drones in a single swarm. Not someday. Not in theory. Right now, DARPA is soliciting proposals for containerised autonomous drone systems capable of launching, recovering, and coordinating constellations of up to 500 unmanned aircraft from...
America’s Fighter Factory Problem: Why the World’s Largest Air Force Can’t Build Jets Fast Enough
Yesterday, we reported on a remarkable letter from the nation’s Adjutants General to Congress, demanding the Air Force buy at least 72 — and ideally 100 — new fighters per year to prevent the force from shrinking below the threshold needed to fight a major war....
Tomcats 4, Gaddafi 0: The Gulf of Sidra Shootdowns
Muammar Gaddafi drew a line across the Mediterranean and dared the United States Navy to cross it. The Navy crossed it twice. Both times, F-14 Tomcats answered. The two Gulf of Sidra incidents — 1981 and 1989 — are the only American air-to-air kills of the 1980s. They...
What Actually Happens Inside a Wind Tunnel
Every aircraft you have ever seen in the sky was first tested in a room where nothing flies at all. Wind tunnels are, conceptually, the simplest tools in aerospace engineering: take a tube, put air in one end, put a model in the middle, and measure what happens. In...
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