McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee: Canada’s Only Carrier Jet Fighter
Share this story The McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee was the only jet fighter the Royal Canadian Navy ever flew from a carrier deck, and Canada very nearly did not get it. The navy asked for sixty new aircraft. It received thirty-nine used ones, handed down from the United...
HMCS Bonaventure: Canada Refitted Its Carrier, Then Scrapped It
Share this story In April 1966 the Royal Canadian Navy sent its only aircraft carrier into a shipyard at Lauzon, Quebec, for a mid-life refit. The point of a mid-life refit is the clue: you spend the money because the ship has another life to run. She came out sixteen...
Newark Ground Stop: One Cut Cable, Eight Hours, Five Airports
Share this story At about ten o’clock on Monday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped Newark Liberty, Teterboro and Philadelphia International. At one in the afternoon it added John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia. Between roughly 09:40 and just after...
Polar Routes: Why Airliners Cross the Arctic but Not Antarctica
Share this story There is a Boeing 757 parked on the Antarctic ice at 79 degrees south. It is white, it has rows of passenger windows, and it got there under its own power on a runway of polished blue ice at Union Glacier, roughly 1,000 kilometres from the South Pole....
Great Circle Routes: Why Pacific Flights Curve North Past Alaska
Share this story Open a flight tracker halfway through a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight and the aircraft is somewhere it has no business being. Not out in the middle of the blue, where the straight line on the screen says it should be, but up near the top of the map, off...
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
V-1 Flying Bomb: The RAF Trick of Tipping It With a Wingtip
Share this story The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate...
Delta Returns to Monterey: New LAX and Salt Lake Routes
Share this story Delta has not flown to Monterey since 2008. From 19 December it will fly there twice a day from Los Angeles and once a day from Salt Lake City. The airline announced three new domestic routes on Friday, two of them serving a small coastal California...
Embraer Praetor 600E: Flexjet Takes the First Smart Window Jet
Share this story Business jets do not usually change much. A new variant means a bit more range, a quieter cabin, a fresh avionics load. The aeroplane that Flexjet accepted on 18 September 2026 has something genuinely new in it: a 42-inch curved 4K OLED screen built...
National Championship Air Races: The Unlimiteds Return at Roswell
Share this story Somewhere over the New Mexico desert this afternoon, a heavily modified Second World War fighter will round a fifty-foot pylon at something north of 450 mph, about as close to the ground as a sensible person parks a car. Today is the closing day of...
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