The Fighter With Its Wings On Backwards
Picture a desert morning at Edwards in 1949: dust, sagebrush, and a fighter that looks like someone bolted the wings on the wrong way round. Most aircraft wings are fat where they meet the fuselage and slim to a graceful point at the tip. The Republic XF-91...
Japan Wrapped a Jet in White. Why?
On a humid June afternoon, a Japanese plane-spotter pointed a long lens at the flight line of Gifu Air Base and froze. Tucked against a hangar wall sat something large, the size of a fighter, and it was wrapped from nose to tail in white fabric like a piece of...
Singapore Airlines Eyes 50 New Widebody Jets
When Singapore Airlines goes shopping for aircraft, the rest of the industry leans in to watch. The Changi-based carrier has spent decades building a reputation as a benchmark for premium long-haul flying, and the jets it chooses tend to become the jets everyone else...
The Man Who Jumped From the Edge of Space
On 16 August 1960, a tiny open gondola hung beneath an enormous helium balloon, 102,800 feet above the New Mexico desert. That is more than 31 kilometres up — high enough that the sky overhead is black, the horizon curves, and there is almost no air left to breathe....
The Coke-Bottle Trick That Broke the Sound Barrier
In the early 1950s, the newest, fastest jets in the world kept running into an invisible wall. They would accelerate beautifully — and then, just short of the speed of sound, a surge of drag would swallow their engines’ power and stop them dead. Brand-new fighters...
The Soviet SR-71 That Never Flew
Before the SR-71 Blackbird ever ripped across the sky, a Soviet aircraft designer was already trying to build something to beat it. His name was Pavel Tsybin, and his creation — the RSR — was meant to streak over the United States at three times the speed of sound,...
Where Asia’s Jets Will Go to Be Fixed
When an airliner needs more than a routine turnaround — one of the deep, weeks-long teardowns that strip it to the structure, inspect everything and put it back together — it doesn’t just taxi to a gate. It disappears into an MRO: a maintenance, repair and overhaul...
Sydney’s New Airport Never Closes
For as long as most Sydneysiders can remember, the city’s air traffic has run into a wall every night. Kingsford Smith Airport — Sydney’s only major gateway — shuts to most aircraft between 11pm and 6am under a hard legal curfew. After dark, one of the busiest...
Vietnam Built a Lotus Mega-Airport in Five Years
Rise above the red earth east of Ho Chi Minh City and a vast lotus flower seems to bloom out of the construction dust. It is not a sculpture. It is the roof of Long Thanh International Airport — Vietnam’s roughly US$16 billion bet on becoming one of Southeast Asia’s...
The Plane That Killed Both Its Test Pilots
There are bad aircraft, and then there is the Christmas Bullet — a machine so misconceived that it holds a record no other aeroplane will ever want: it killed a test pilot on its first flight, and then killed a second test pilot on the first flight of the second...
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