China’s J-36 Can Reach Taiwan — the F-47 Can’t
Share this story A fighter is only as dangerous as the distance it can cross. On paper, America’s new F-47 is the longest-legged fighter the United States has ever built — and over the one map that matters most, the Western Pacific, it still comes up short. China’s...
The Machine That Overrules the Pilot
Share this story Just before midnight on 1 July 2002, two aircraft converged over the Bodensee at 36,000 feet. One was a DHL Boeing 757 freighter climbing out of Bergamo with two pilots aboard. The other was a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 carrying 69 people from...
Engines Turn or Passengers Swim
Share this story On the evening of 1 February 1985, a Trans World Airlines Boeing 767 pushed back at Boston’s Logan Airport, bound for Paris. To the passengers it was an ordinary red-eye. It was anything but. Sixteen TWA pilots had been through special training...
Ford’s Super Hornets Wear Their War Paint
Share this story Fighter jets keep diaries. They keep them in stencilled paint, just below the cockpit rail, and if you know how to read them they will tell you exactly what kind of year the crews have had. On the Fourth of July, as the Super Hornets of Carrier Air...
K2 Airways 737 Vanishes Over the Arabian Sea
Share this story The Boeing 737 freighter working K2 Airways flight 1732 on Tuesday evening was less than an hour from home. It had left Sharjah for Karachi with five crew and a hold full of cargo, a two-hour hop across the Arabian Sea that Pakistani freight operators...
The Kamikaze That Left Its Shadow on a Warship: HMS Sussex, 1945
Look at the side of the ship and you can see it: the ghost of an aeroplane. Two wings, a fuselage, even the struts of a fixed undercarriage — a full-size silhouette of an aircraft, printed onto grey naval steel. It is one of the strangest and most haunting photographs...
The YF-17 Cobra: The Fighter That Lost — and Became the F/A-18 Hornet
In the history of fighter aircraft, almost nobody remembers the runner-up. The jet that loses the competition gets a museum plaque, if it is lucky, and the winner gets the production line. The Northrop YF-17 Cobra is the great exception. It lost — and then went on to...
The An-225 Mriya: The Largest Aircraft Ever Built
There are big aircraft, and then there was the Mriya. Stand under a Boeing 747 and you feel small. Stand under an An-225 and the 747 starts to look like the small one. For 33 years exactly one of these machines existed — a six-engined Soviet giant built for a single,...
From Bombers to the Vespa to Drones
Share this story In the spring of 1946, in a factory near Pisa that Allied bombers had flattened only months before, an engineer wheeled out a strange little machine — a step-through scooter with a rounded steel body and a small engine tucked by the rear wheel. Enrico...
Batik Air Links Kuala Lumpur to Sydney
Share this story Sydney has a new way to reach Asia, and it comes wearing a splash of Malaysian batik on its tail. From 1 July 2026, Batik Air Malaysia flies a daily Airbus A330 between Kuala Lumpur and Sydney — the airline’s fourth city in Australia and a fresh shot...
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