Seat 11A, Jeans and Brace Position: Three Cabin Safety Myths
Share this story On 12 June 2025, an Air India Boeing 787-8 came down within a minute of leaving Ahmedabad. Of the 242 people on board, one walked away: Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, who had been sitting in seat 11A. People on the ground were...
Flying Tiger 739: 107 People Vanished Over the Pacific
Share this story Ninety-three young American soldiers, three South Vietnamese servicemen and eleven civilian crew boarded a Super Constellation at Travis Air Force Base in March 1962 and flew west. Somewhere between Guam and the Philippines, the aeroplane stopped...
The Afghan Air Force Five Years After the Taliban
Share this story Five years after the Taliban walked into Kabul, one of the odder questions in military aviation is still unanswered: what is actually left of the air force the United States spent two decades and billions of dollars building? The honest answer is that...
Algeria Closes Its Airspace to UAE Aircraft
Share this story At midnight on 11 September 2026, Algeria closed its airspace to every civilian and military aircraft registered in the United Arab Emirates. It is the kind of announcement that sounds enormous and, in commercial terms, changes almost nothing. The UAE...
Uzbekistan’s First C-390: Embraer Lands in Central Asia
Share this story There is a photograph doing the rounds of a grey twinjet sitting in a hangar in Brazil, wearing markings almost nobody expected to see on an Embraer product: the words UZ AIR FORCE, the registration UK 39010, and roundels in the blue, white and green...
Tom Froling: The Selfridge F-16 Pilot Airborne on 9/11
Share this story At ten to nine on a clear Tuesday morning, Lieutenant Colonel Tom Froling lifted off from Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Harrison Township, Michigan, and turned north. The trees had not started to change yet. It was, by every measure available...
910th Airlift Wing: The C-130s That Spray America’s Mosquitoes
Share this story On an August night over North Dakota, a four-engine transport aircraft crosses the city of Minot at about the height of a tall office block, in the dark, with two steel booms poking out of the doors where paratroopers normally jump. It is not...
Moldova Drone Alert: Zelensky’s A319 Delayed, Not Near-Hit
Share this story The white jet with the blue-and-yellow tail sat on the apron at Chișinău on Tuesday afternoon with nowhere to go. Volodymyr Zelensky was due in Oslo that evening for the funeral of King Harald V, a state occasion with more than 150 inbound...
Focke-Wulf Ta 154: The Glue Did Not Kill It Alone
Share this story The story usually goes like this. Germany built a wooden night fighter to match the de Havilland Mosquito. It was fast and it worked. Then the RAF bombed the single factory making the special glue that held it together, the substitute adhesive was...
Operation Yellow Ribbon: The Day Gander Took 6,600 Strangers
Share this story Gander sits in the middle of Newfoundland, in spruce and bog, a long way from anywhere. In 2001 fewer than ten thousand people lived there. Its airport had four runways built for a different era, when piston airliners needed to stop for fuel before...
Recent Comments