Air Canada Bets Big on a Smaller Jet
Share this story On the first morning of June, an Air Canada jet pushed back at Montreal and pointed its nose at Nantes, a tidy French city on the Loire that no Canadian airline had ever served nonstop. Two days later, a widebody lifted off from Toronto bound for...
A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer
Share this story A small white jet with a chequered flag down its flank taxied to a stop outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on a bright Saturday in June, and a 9-year-old’s dream from 1962 finally landed. The pilot who climbed down was Ed Noel. The aircraft...
China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus
Share this story On a Friday afternoon in Shanghai, executives from China Eastern Airlines and Airbus signed their names to a document that quietly reshapes the balance of power in the world’s most fought-over aviation market. The deal: 25 brand-new Airbus A330-900neo...
The Plane So Ugly It Ended Up in Mad Max
Share this story There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond...
The Supersonic Fighter That Took Off From the Sea
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked an audacious question: what if a jet fighter did not need a runway, or even an aircraft carrier? What if it could simply take off from the open sea? Convair’s answer was one of the strangest warplanes ever flown...
The Buccaneer: Britain’s Wave-Top Strike Legend
Share this story Picture the view from the cockpit. The sea is a grey blur a hundred feet below, ripping past at well over 500 knots. The horizon barely moves; the world is a tunnel of speed. Most aircraft, this low and this fast, would be a snarling, twitchy handful,...
He Pedaled a Plane Across the Channel
Share this story Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence...
The Flying Dorito That Cost $5 Billion
Share this story It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s...
Cathay Opens a New Door to Central Asia
Share this story Try, today, to fly from Hong Kong to Almaty. You can’t — not directly. You go the long way, connecting through the Gulf, or Istanbul, or Moscow, turning a regional hop into a day-long ordeal. From early 2027, that finally changes. Cathay...
Toronto to Shanghai, Nonstop Once More
Share this story There was applause at the gate. On 3 June 2026, as Air Canada flight AC27 pushed back from Toronto Pearson bound for Shanghai, staff and travellers marked the moment with the kind of small ceremony airlines reserve for something that actually matters....
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