Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
Share this story On Tuesday afternoon in Dhaka, a government adviser stood up at the Secretariat and confirmed that a committee had finished drafting the agreement. Bangladesh intends to buy the Chengdu J-10.Twenty aircraft. A headline figure of $2.302 billion. And a...
Share this story For four years, one of the more entertaining puzzles in open-source intelligence has been a set of aircraft-shaped objects sitting on Chinese ramps. They looked a bit like the Chengdu J-20. They also looked a bit wrong. Analysts squinted at satellite...
Share this story Twelve years on, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard is still missing. Not missing in the sense that nobody knows exactly where the wreck lies — missing in the sense that the largest and most expensive underwater search in history has now...
Share this story The Bell 47 is the helicopter everyone can draw: a glass bubble, an open lattice tail, two men sitting in what looks like a goldfish bowl on skids. It is the machine in the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and for a generation it was simply what the word...
Share this story For fifty-nine years, one place on earth let you watch Second World War fighters flown at full power, fifty feet off the desert, at more than five hundred miles an hour, around pylons, against each other. Reno ended in 2023. The races themselves did...
Share this story In 1933 Boeing built the aeroplane that made every other airliner in the world obsolete overnight. All-metal, cantilever low wing, retractable undercarriage, autopilot, de-icing boots, a heated and insulated cabin, and 189 miles an hour in cruise. It...
Share this story At about twenty to eight on the evening of 15 May 1941, after a day of weather bad enough to keep everyone waiting, a small silver aeroplane with no propeller took off from RAF Cranwell and flew for seventeen minutes. It was not the first jet aircraft...
Share this story Six Grumman Avengers took off from Midway on the morning of 4 June 1942. It was the aircraft’s first day of combat. One came back, flown by a pilot with no elevator control, no flaps, no compass, no radio, a dead gunner behind him and sixty-four...
Share this story Look at it once and you understand why the legend stuck. The Gee Bee R-1 is a barrel with a propeller bolted to the front, a wing that looks borrowed from something half its weight, and a cockpit shoved so far back it is practically part of the tail....
Share this story Two minutes and six seconds into its take-off roll, with less than 800 feet of a 15,000-foot runway left, an aeroplane made almost entirely of paper honeycomb and graphite fibre finally came unstuck from Edwards Air Force Base. Its wingtips had been...
Share this story The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third...
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