Share this story You have almost certainly seen this crash, even if you have never heard of the aircraft. A stubby, wingless machine tumbles end over end across a desert lakebed, throwing up a cloud of dust, and comes to rest upside down. For millions of people, that...
Share this story In 1960, a young civilian test pilot named Neil Armstrong was quietly picked to fly into space — not in a capsule on top of a rocket, but in a winged glider that would ride a booster to orbit and then fly home to a runway like an aeroplane. The...
Share this story Saudi Arabia’s glossy new airline has just made its boldest move yet. On 4 August 2026, Riyadh Air flew its first service to Mumbai — a daily Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner between the Saudi capital and India’s financial heart, and the...
Share this story For the first time, a Boeing 737 MAX wears the colours of Tajikistan. On 3 August 2026, Somon Air rolled a brand-new 737-8 onto the apron at Dushanbe International Airport — the first aircraft of its type ever to join a Tajik fleet, and the...
Share this story It looked like something bolted together in a shed: an open cockpit, fixed landing gear, a wing borrowed from a light aircraft. But the ungainly little Bell X-14 could do something almost nothing else in 1957 could — rise straight up off the...
Share this story On September 27, 1956, Captain Milburn “Mel” Apt became the first human being to fly at three times the speed of sound. Minutes later he was dead. The Bell X-2 gave the world its first taste of Mach 3 and, on the very same flight, its...
Share this story On its very first combat mission, a brand-new B-17 bomber bellied into a swamp in Papua New Guinea. The crew walked away, trekked six weeks through the jungle, and survived. The aircraft did not move again for sixty-four years — and when people...
Share this story In July 1942, eight American warplanes vanished into the Greenland ice. Fifty years later, a team of dreamers with a hot-water drill brought one of them back up — and in 2002, it flew again. This is the story of the P-38 Lightning called Glacier...
Share this story You could identify it from the ground before you could hear it: two long booms, a pod slung between them, and a wing that seemed to float without a fuselage behind it. Nothing else in the sky of 1942 looked remotely like the P-38 Lightning —...
Share this story Heathrow has not laid a single metre of new runway. It has not even secured permission to build one. And yet, as of a regulator’s ruling on July 29, 2026, passengers are now on the hook for the bill.The UK Civil Aviation Authority has cleared...
Share this story Its own crews called it “the Beast.” Less politely, they said the letters SB2C stood for “Son of a Bitch, 2nd Class.” An MIT professor who studied a model of it in a wind tunnel declared that anyone who built more than one...
Share this story Eric “Winkle” Brown flew more different types of aircraft than any human being who has ever lived — nearly five hundred of them, from Spitfires to jets to captured German rocket planes. And of all of them, the one he wrote about with...
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