ARIA: The Flying Radio Stations That Talked to Apollo 11
Share this story About seven minutes before Apollo 11’s third stage fired to send it to the Moon on 16 July 1969, the spacecraft was over the open Pacific, far from any ground station. Houston was still talking to the crew, through a modified Air Force jet...
The Day a Fish Hit a Jet: Alaska Airlines, Juneau, 1987
Share this story Pilots are trained for bird strikes. Nobody trains for fish. Yet on 30 March 1987, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 climbing out of Juneau, Alaska, was hit by a fish that had been dropped by an eagle. The story ran in newspapers on 1 April, so plenty of...
Riyadh Airport Attack: 12 Killed as Missile Hits King Khalid Terminals
Share this story The third strike in four days was the one nobody walked away from. On Saturday, 10 October 2026, a projectile slammed into King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, the Saudi capital’s main gateway, killing at least 12 people and wounding...
Queen Suthida Flies the Gripen Solo: Thailand’s First Female Gripen Pilot
Share this story At 10:06 on Thursday 8 October 2026, a single-seat JAS 39C Gripen rolled down Runway 22 at Wing 7, Surat Thani, in southern Thailand. In the cockpit, alone, was Queen Suthida. She landed 41 minutes later as, in the words of the Bureau of the Royal...
Scott O’Grady: Basher 52’s Six Days Behind Serb Lines in 1995
Share this story For six days in June 1995, a hunted man in Bosnia was a 29-year-old American fighter pilot lying face-down in the undergrowth. Bosnian Serb soldiers walked past him. Some fired their rifles nearby. He ate leaves, grass and insects, and squeezed...
MQ-9 Reapers in Latin America: SOUTHCOM’s Drone Surge Explained
Share this story “¡Drones Reaper: los nuevos cazadores del narcotráfico!” The post from Ecuador’s Ministry of Defence this week did not bother with subtlety. Reaper drones, it announced, are the new hunters of drug trafficking. Defence Minister Gian Carlo Loffredo...
Operation Homecoming 1973: The Hanoi Taxi Flies the POWs Home
Share this story A column of buses stops beside a bomb-damaged hangar at Gia Lam Airport, Hanoi, just after noon on 12 February 1973. Inside are 116 American prisoners of war in identical new jackets that their captors issued a few days earlier. Most of them have...
Syrian General Staff Raid: Israel’s Phantoms Over Damascus, 1973
Share this story Somewhere over Lebanon, a few minutes from Damascus, seven Israeli Phantoms are flying low under a grey lid of cloud. The weather was fair when they left Israel. Over the Syrian border it has closed in, with turbulence shaking the jets and the ground...
Saudia A320 Burned Out at Riyadh as Houthis Claim a Missile Hit
Share this story The first images showed a column of black smoke rising over King Khalid International Airport. The next showed what was underneath it: a Saudia narrowbody standing at the terminal, its cabin burned out, fire crews around it. Nobody is believed to have...
Why Pilots Say “Niner”: The Story of the Aviation Alphabet
Share this story Listen to a fighter pilot reading back a heading or a squawk code and you will hear something odd: “two-seven-niner”, “tree”, “fife”. It sounds like a quirk of military slang. It is not. Those pronunciations are...
Recent Comments