Share this story Line up on the centreline in a small propeller aircraft, push the throttle smoothly to full power, and do nothing with your feet. Within seconds the nose starts drifting left, as if the runway were tilted. Flight instructors have a two-word cure for...
Share this story Lieutenant Devon Jones had dug himself a hole in the Iraqi desert with his survival knife and pulled the landscape over the top. He was so well hidden that when an American A-10 thundered directly over him at about 300 feet, its pilot saw nothing at...
Share this story In the summer of 1919, almost every aeroplane in the world was made of wood, wire and doped fabric. On 25 June that year, at Dessau in Germany, test pilot Emil Monz took off in something entirely different: a low-wing monoplane with no bracing wires...
Share this story On our numbers, a Cessna 152 that flies 20 hours a year costs its owner about $575 for every hour in the air, once the capital tied up in it is counted. The same aeroplane flown 100 hours costs about $177. Nothing about the airframe changes between...
Share this story Open the nose of an F-22 Raptor and you will not find a dish nodding from side to side. You will find a flat, fixed plate carrying 1,956 transmit/receive modules, each about the size of a stick of gum. The beam it produces can jump from one part of...
Share this story In December 1991 the newly independent Ukraine woke up as, on paper, the world’s third nuclear power. Soviet forces on its territory included around 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads, thousands of tactical weapons, 176 intercontinental ballistic...
Share this story On the morning of 4 October 1989, a B-1B Lancer of the 96th Bombardment Wing took off from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, at 8:38 a.m. on a training flight. About three hours later the crew found that the nose landing gear would not come down. By that...
Share this story In 2023 an airline did something routine. It contacted Safran, the engine maker, to check the authenticity of a part it had bought from AOG Technics, a UK trader run from a home office in Surrey. Safran looked at the release certificate and saw that...
Share this story Every task card a mechanic signs on a modern airliner, from a lubrication point on a flap track to a borescope look inside an engine, traces back to a meeting room. Long before the type carried its first passenger, engineers from the manufacturer,...
Share this story On 22 December 1969, an F-111 pulled out of a practice bombing run over the Nevada desert at four g, and its left wing came off. The culprit was a flaw about an inch long, forged into a steel fitting at the factory and missed repeatedly by inspectors...
Share this story Nobody asked SIAI-Marchetti to build a jet trainer. In 1976 the company behind the SF.260 piston trainer started work on one anyway, as a private venture, betting that the air forces already flying its propeller aircraft would want a cheap, modern jet...
Share this story In the 1960s the Soviet Union had thousands of small airfields, and around a thousand of them were little more than grass strips under 700 metres long. The aircraft serving them were piston-engined relics: Lisunov Li-2s, Ilyushin Il-12s and Il-14s,...
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