RAF Hawk T2 Crash at Valley: Both Pilots Eject, Fleet Paused
Share this story A man standing near the perimeter of RAF Valley on Wednesday morning watched a jet take off, the way he had watched hundreds before, and knew within a second or two that this one was wrong. By the time the aircraft had climbed to what he estimated at...
How Does Radar Work? Pulse, Doppler, Range and Bearing Explained
Share this story Radar does one simple thing extremely fast. It shouts into the dark, listens for an echo, and times how long the echo took to come back. Everything else is refinement. The shout is a pulse of radio energy. The echo is a vanishingly small fraction of...
Why Airlines Kill Their Longest Routes: The Ultra-Long-Haul Maths
Share this story Every few years an airline announces the world’s longest flight, collects the headlines, and then quietly kills it. Singapore Airlines did it twice. Air Canada is doing it right now with Vancouver to Singapore. Qantas is about to do the opposite...
The DEW Line: A Radar Fence Across the Top of the World
Share this story In 1952 a group of scientists at MIT was asked a straightforward question: how vulnerable are the United States and Canada to aerial bombing? Their answer was that a line of search radars should be built across the Arctic, as rapidly as possible. Two...
Global Hawk and Triton: Why the Navy Built Its Own
Share this story Put a Global Hawk and a Triton side by side and most people would call it the same aeroplane. Same enormous wing, same whale-shaped fuselage, same V-tail, same manufacturer. They are not the same aeroplane, and the difference comes down to one...
Qantas Confirms Sydney to New York Nonstop for 2028
Share this story Qantas has been trying to fly from Sydney to New York without stopping for roughly as long as the route has existed. On Wednesday it put a date on it: mid-2028. The airline confirmed that Sydney to New York will be the second route in Project Sunrise,...
Continue for the Runway: Four Words, One A350, One Live Runway
Share this story Continue for the runway. Four words, issued thousands of times a day at airports all over the United States, and on 15 September at Newark they put a 300-tonne airliner on an active runway that nobody had cleared it to enter. The aircraft was a...
The One Test Stand Keeping F-22s and B-2s Flying
Share this story America has nineteen B-2 Spirits and fewer than 190 F-22 Raptors. Both are irreplaceable, both are out of production, and for several months this year the ability to keep them flying depended on one piece of welded steel in Utah that had caught fire....
Australia Declares the Triton and the Peregrine Operational
Share this story Australia has a surveillance problem that is essentially arithmetic. The area it is expected to watch is vast, the number of aircraft it can afford is not, and the distances mean an aircraft spends much of its life transiting rather than looking. On...
FAA Age Limits: Why Pilots Retire at 65 and Controllers Start by 31
Share this story Two of the most demanding jobs in aviation have hard age limits written into American law. One of them ends a career. The other one prevents a career from ever starting. An airline captain who is flying a perfect line check on the morning of their...
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