Share this story A number from a Chinese laboratory has been making the rounds, and it is a striking one: 95 percent. That, according to a computer simulation, is how often a Chengdu J-20 beat an American F-22 Raptor in a fight north of Taiwan. Read a little closer,...
Share this story In March 2026, a silver jet with a wickedly swept wing thundered down a runway near Houston and hauled itself into the Texas sky. It was a North American F-100 Super Sabre — one of only two left flying anywhere on earth — and its return is a good...
Share this story In the late 1930s, Bell Aircraft set out to build a fighter so ambitious that it needed gunners riding inside the engines. The result, the Bell YFM-1 Airacuda, was sleek, futuristic, bristling with cannon — and one of the most gloriously misguided...
Share this story Long before anyone talked about “loyal wingman” drones flying off crewed jets, the Soviet Union built the real thing: a flying aircraft carrier. A single giant bomber would haul as many as five fighters into the sky, cut them loose in mid-air — and,...
Share this story Heathrow, a December morning. The fog is so dense that from the cockpit of a taxiing 777 the crew cannot see their own wingtip. Officially, the runway visual range is 125 metres — about the length of the aircraft plus a bus. And yet, every couple of...
Share this story Four minutes after lifting off from Singapore Changi Airport on 4 November 2010, Qantas Flight 32 was climbing through 7,400 feet when the passengers heard it: a bang, then a second, heavier one that shuddered through the cabin. On the flight deck,...
Share this story It is the evening of 27 October 1962, and inside Soviet submarine B-59, somewhere north of Cuba, the temperature has passed 45 degrees Celsius and the air is running out. The batteries are almost dead. Men are fainting at their stations. For hours,...
Share this story In the red dirt of Alice Springs, in the middle of the Australian outback, a Boeing 787-9 sat parked for the better part of a year — not broken, not retired, just waiting for engines. On June 28 it finally flew home to Auckland, and with it, Air New...
Share this story For a quarter of a century, GOL has been Brazil’s definitive short-haul airline: a vast orange-tailed fleet of Boeing 737s hopping between São Paulo, Rio and every corner of South America. On July 8, that identity changes. A GOL flight number will...
Share this story Somewhere in the Pacific in the coming weeks, a US Navy cruiser that fired Tomahawks in two wars will be hit by torpedoes, missiles and bombs until she slips under — and the people shooting will be her friends. The decommissioned USS Mobile Bay is...
Share this story At a secret airfield in the Nevada desert in the early 1980s, a test pilot lined up one of the ugliest aircraft ever built and pushed the throttles forward. It looked less like a jet than a flying shipping container — deep-bodied, boxy, with a curved...
Share this story From the moment humans first left the ground, a certain kind of pilot has asked a dangerous question: what happens if I try this? The answers fill the wildest chapter of aviation history — a century of loops, rolls, dives and impossible threading of...
Recent Comments