A Robot Boat Just Rescued Two Downed Pilots
Somewhere off the coast of Oman, in the dark, two U.S. Army aviators are treading water. Their AH-64 Apache is gone — minutes ago it was flying a patrol near the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, and now it is at the bottom of the Gulf. They are alive, but they are in...
Air Canada Bets Big on a Smaller Jet
On the first morning of June, an Air Canada jet pushed back at Montreal and pointed its nose at Nantes, a tidy French city on the Loire that no Canadian airline had ever served nonstop. Two days later, a widebody lifted off from Toronto bound for Shanghai for the...
A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer
A small white jet with a chequered flag down its flank taxied to a stop outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on a bright Saturday in June, and a 9-year-old’s dream from 1962 finally landed. The pilot who climbed down was Ed Noel. The aircraft was...
China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus
On a Friday afternoon in Shanghai, executives from China Eastern Airlines and Airbus signed their names to a document that quietly reshapes the balance of power in the world’s most fought-over aviation market. The deal: 25 brand-new Airbus A330-900neo widebodies, with...
The Plane So Ugly It Ended Up in Mad Max
There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome cast it...
The Supersonic Fighter That Took Off From the Sea
In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked an audacious question: what if a jet fighter did not need a runway, or even an aircraft carrier? What if it could simply take off from the open sea? Convair’s answer was one of the strangest warplanes ever flown — a delta-winged...
The Buccaneer: Britain’s Wave-Top Strike Legend
Picture the view from the cockpit. The sea is a grey blur a hundred feet below, ripping past at well over 500 knots. The horizon barely moves; the world is a tunnel of speed. Most aircraft, this low and this fast, would be a snarling, twitchy handful, fighting their...
He Pedaled a Plane Across the Channel
Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence over the water has...
The Flying Dorito That Cost $5 Billion
It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s most important...
Cathay Opens a New Door to Central Asia
Try, today, to fly from Hong Kong to Almaty. You can’t — not directly. You go the long way, connecting through the Gulf, or Istanbul, or Moscow, turning a regional hop into a day-long ordeal. From early 2027, that finally changes. Cathay Pacific has...
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