The Soviet SR-71 That Never Flew
Share this story 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...
Where Asia’s Jets Will Go to Be Fixed
Share this story 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,...
Sydney’s New Airport Never Closes
Share this story 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...
Vietnam Built a Lotus Mega-Airport in Five Years
Share this story 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...
The Plane That Killed Both Its Test Pilots
Share this story 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...
India Built 30 New Fighters It Cannot Fly
Share this story On the flight line at Hindustan Aeronautics in Nashik and Bengaluru sit some of the most modern fighter jets India has ever built: brand-new Tejas Mk1A light fighters in Indian Air Force grey, radars fitted, flight-test boxes ticked. There is just one...
Britain’s Tailless Fighter That Squatted Like a Bird
Share this story It had no tail. It squatted on its undercarriage like a startled bird. It was named after a flying reptile, and in the buttoned-up world of 1930s British aviation it looked like a practical joke. The Westland-Hill Pterodactyl was none of those things....
Australia’s Forgotten 47-Kill Ace
Share this story Ask anyone to name a First World War fighter ace and you’ll hear the same handful of names: the Red Baron, perhaps Billy Bishop, maybe Albert Ball. You will almost never hear the name of the deadliest pilot the Southern Hemisphere ever produced — a...
AirAsia X Returns to London After 14 Years
Share this story Fourteen years ago, AirAsia X tried to do something that sober aviation economists said couldn’t be done: fly a budget airline halfway around the planet. It ran low-cost long-haul flights from Kuala Lumpur to London and Paris — and in 2012, bruised by...
The Hidden Engine in Your Airliner’s Tail
Share this story You step onto a parked airliner and everything just works. The cabin lights are on, the air is cool, screens are glowing — and yet the two great engines on the wings are stone-cold silent. Somewhere behind you, a faint high-pitched whine is the only...
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