Inside the Geran-4: RFE/RL Tears Down Russia’s Jet Shahed
Share this story Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has taken a Russian Geran-4 apart on camera, and what spills out of the airframe is less a Russian weapon than a catalogue of global supply chains. The jet-powered successor to the Shahed carries around 55 foreign-made...
Russian Woodpecker: The Duga Radar and Cobra Mist Enigma
Share this story In the summer of 1976 a sound arrived on the shortwave bands that nobody had asked for. It was a hard, flat tapping, roughly ten beats a second, and it walked. One week it sat on top of an amateur band, the next it was parked across an aeronautical...
Kennedy, von Braun and the Saturn: The Visit Before “We Choose to Go to the Moon”
Share this story On the morning of 11 September 1962, the President of the United States stepped off his aircraft at the Redstone Arsenal airfield in Huntsville, Alabama, and shook hands with the man who had built Hitler’s V-2. Wernher von Braun, now director of...
Flying Animals: How Pandas, Horses and an Orca Travel by Air
Share this story On Sunday a FedEx Boeing 777F landed in Atlanta carrying nothing but two giant pandas, their bamboo and their keepers. It made headlines, but it was not unusual. Every year airlines and air forces move racehorses, zoo animals, livestock and even...
Dead Man’s Curve: The Helicopter Height-Velocity Diagram Explained
Share this story A helicopter hovering 200 feet above a field looks like the safest thing in the sky. It is going nowhere, slowly. But if its single engine stops at that moment, the pilot is in one of the worst places a helicopter can be: too high to simply drop onto...
Tail Strikes Explained: Why Airliners Scrape Their Tails
Share this story Watch a long airliner rotate on take-off and there is a moment when the nose is high, the main wheels are still on the concrete and the tail is only a metre or two above the runway. Rotate a little too fast, or a little too early, and that gap closes....
IndiGo A321 Tail Strike at Bengaluru After a Go-Around
Share this story The first approach into Bengaluru did not work out, so the crew of IndiGo flight 6E 6542 went around. On the second attempt, in gusty winds on Sunday 27 September, the tail of their Airbus A321 touched the runway. The jet landed safely and everyone...
Delta DL251 Smoke Emergency: A330 Diverts to Porto
Share this story Two hours out of Barcelona, somewhere west of the Iberian coast, the cabin of Delta Air Lines flight DL251 began to fill with smoke. The Airbus A330-300 was bound for Boston with 296 passengers on board. Instead of pressing on across the Atlantic, the...
The KC-135 That Towed a Crippled F-111 Out of North Vietnam
Share this story “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! We’ve been struck by a missile.” The call came over the radio late in the Vietnam War, as a KC-135 Stratotanker crew was finishing a refuelling mission over Southeast Asia and getting ready to turn for home....
Remove Before Flight: What the Red Tags on Aircraft Really Do
Share this story Walk around any aircraft parked on a ramp and you will see them fluttering in the breeze: long red ribbons printed with three words in white capitals. REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. They hang from pitot tubes, landing gear, engine intakes and ejection seats,...
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