Share this story Every student pilot memorises the table. Three miles, five hundred below, a thousand above, two thousand horizontal. Then one statute mile and clear of clouds somewhere near the bottom, and five miles with a mile of horizontal clearance somewhere near...
Share this story On Monday in Athens, Greece signed for three Embraer KC-390 Millennium transports, with options for three more, to replace a Hellenic Air Force C-130H fleet that has been flying since the 1970s. Within hours the comment sections filled with the same...
Share this story The missile does not roar out of the tube. It pops. A small motor kicks it clear of the launcher, and only when the missile is several metres away does its main motor light with a crack and a streak of smoke. That gentle start is one of the tricks...
Share this story In October 1978 a huge freighter lifted off from Rolls-Royce’s airfield at Hucknall with a problem its crew could not fix. The flaps had dropped on take-off and would not come back up. So pilots Bob Reynolds and ‘Rocky’ Oliver flew...
Share this story Somewhere over Bosnia and Herzegovina on the morning of Monday 2 November, the crew of Wizz Air flight W6 4302 learned that someone claimed there was a bomb on board. They were carrying passengers from London Luton to Sofia. Within minutes they had...
Share this story The certificate that makes a pilot legally employable arrives at 250 flight hours. The certificate a United States airline is required to hire arrives at 1,500. Between those two numbers sits a gap of 1,250 hours that nobody teaches you, nobody...
Share this story The cart is stowed, the lights are down, and the cabin crew member strapped into the jumpseat a metre from your knees has gone oddly still. Back flat against the seat. Feet together. Hands pushed under the thighs, palms up. Eyes open, looking at...
Share this story On 24 October 1974, a C-5A Galaxy flying over the Pacific let an intercontinental ballistic missile fall out of its cargo hold. The 86,000-pound Minuteman I dropped from 20,000 feet to about 8,000 feet. Then its first-stage motor lit, and a ten-second...
Share this story On 13 January 1920, a New York Times editorial mocked the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Once a rocket left the air, the paper argued, it would have nothing to push against, and the professor apparently lacked knowledge taught daily in high schools....
Share this story Walk up to almost any fighter on a museum flight line and look closely at the nose. On a Korean F-4E Phantom, the very tip is jet black. On plenty of other jets the nose cone is a subtly different grey from the fuselage behind it, as if it had been...
Share this story On 15 April 1928, a single-engined monoplane lifted off a scraped-out strip of snow at Point Barrow, Alaska, and pointed its nose across the top of the world. Aboard were the Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins and his pilot, Carl Ben Eielson. Their...
Share this story At around 8.20pm on Friday 30 October 2026, States of Jersey Police took the first call: drones in the restricted airspace over Jersey Airport. The reports kept coming for more than two hours. By the time they stopped, three airliners bound for the...
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