X-51A Waverider: 210 Seconds Above Mach 5 on a Scramjet
Share this story The X-43A proved a scramjet could work for ten seconds. The question the US Air Force asked next was harder: could one keep working for minutes, burning the kind of fuel a real aircraft could carry? On 1 May 2013, over the Pacific, the Boeing X-51A...
X-43A Hyper-X: NASA’s Scramjet That Hit Mach 9.6 in 2004
Share this story Off the coast of southern California on 16 November 2004, a NASA B-52B released a rocket with a strange, flat, surfboard-shaped object bolted to its nose. The Pegasus booster lit, climbed to about 110,000 feet and let go. For roughly ten seconds, the...
L-39 Skyfox Drone Hunter Gets Thales Laser-Guided Rockets
Share this story The jet trainer most famous for teaching pilots to fly fast is learning a new trade: hunting drones. Czech manufacturer Aero Vodochody and Thales Belgium announced on 5 October 2026 that they have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop the...
Power Bank Flight Rules: ICAO’s Two-Bank Limit and mAh vs Wh
Share this story The gate agent turns the power bank over in her hand, looking for a number. The passenger already knows the one printed on the case in the largest type: 20,000 mAh. It is the number the shop advertised, the number on the box, the number in the Amazon...
Morocco’s First F-16 Block 72 Takes Flight in Greenville
Share this story A two-seat F-16 in desert camouflage climbed away from Lockheed Martin’s plant in Greenville, South Carolina, on Tuesday, 6 October 2026, carrying red Moroccan roundels on its wings. It was the first flight of the first F-16 Block 72 ever built,...
Airspeed Explained: IAS, TAS, Groundspeed and Mach
Share this story Ask a pilot how fast the aircraft is going and you may get a question back: which speed do you mean? The cockpit of a jet can show four or five different numbers that all claim to be its speed, and at cruising altitude they can differ by hundreds of...
B-58 Escape Capsule to B-2 Ejection Seat: How Bomber Crews Get Out
Share this story On 8 December 1964, at Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana, a Convair B-58 Hustler sat on the ramp going nowhere. Cranes were rigged alongside it. Then one of its three crew stations fired itself off the aeroplane on a rocket, climbed away on a...
JP-8, JP-5 and Jet A: The Fuels Fighter Jets Burn
Share this story Walk up to a fighter jet after a sortie and the smell hits you before anything else: warm kerosene. To most people, jet fuel is just jet fuel. To air forces and navies, it is a family of carefully specified liquids with names like JP-8, JP-5 and F-24,...
TACAN Explained: How Military Jets Find Their Way Home
Share this story A fighter pilot coming home in bad weather wants to know two things: which direction is base, and how far away is it. For more than seventy years, the answer in military cockpits has come from a system with a slightly clumsy name: TACAN, short for...
Pan Am Flight 6: The 1956 Pacific Ditching Where All 31 Survived
Share this story In the middle of the night, halfway between Honolulu and San Francisco, the Boeing Stratocruiser Clipper Sovereign of the Skies lost two of its four engines. It was too far from land to make it either way. So for hours, its crew flew circles in the...
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