Air India AI2030: 787 Diverted to Jaipur After a Squawk 7500 Alert
Share this story Less than a day after a Corendon Boeing 737 squawked the hijack code over Europe, it happened again, this time over India. On the morning of Wednesday, 14 October 2026, Air India flight AI2030 from Frankfurt to Delhi transmitted squawk 7500, the...
Stargazer: The Last Flying L-1011 TriStar Still Launches Rockets
Share this story Most TriStars were scrapped long ago. One is still working. Stargazer, a 52-year-old Lockheed L-1011 that began life carrying Air Canada passengers, now carries a rocket under its belly, climbs to about 40,000 feet and lets it go. In July 2026 it did...
AN/ALE-50 and BriteCloud: How Towed and Expendable Decoys Work
Share this story There is a moment in the design of every defensive electronic warfare system where the engineering stops being intuitive. You are being tracked by a radar. The obvious response is to drown that radar in noise. And the moment you do, you have told...
Dead Reckoning, LORAN and INS: How Pilots Fly Without GPS
Share this story The first sign is almost always the same. The magenta line on the navigation display does not vanish dramatically; it simply stops agreeing with itself. A position jumps a few miles sideways. The autopilot shrugs. Somewhere in the stack, a box decides...
Restarting a Jet Engine in Flight: Windmill Starts and Core Lock
Share this story When United Airlines flight UA946 had an engine problem over the North Atlantic last weekend, early reports could not agree on whether the engine was shut down for the rest of the flight or restarted on the way to Newfoundland. Either outcome is...
Gust Locks: The Forgotten Pin That Keeps Crashing Aircraft
Share this story Every parked aircraft has a problem: wind. A gust across the ramp can slam a rudder or an elevator against its stops, damaging the control system or hurting someone nearby. The fix is simple and almost as old as aviation itself. Lock the controls....
How Long Does an Airliner Last? Flight Hours, Cycles and Fatigue
Share this story Ask how old an airliner is and you will usually get an answer in years. Ask an engineer and you will get two more numbers: how many hours it has flown, and how many times it has taken off and landed. For the structure of an aircraft, those numbers...
Singapore Airlines Flight 006: Take-Off From a Closed Runway
Share this story Shortly after 11pm on 31 October 2000, a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400 lined up for take-off at Taipei in driving typhoon rain. The crew had been cleared to depart from runway 05L. They were on the wrong runway. The aircraft, flight SQ006 to Los...
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571: 72 Days in the Andes
Share this story Fifty-four years ago today, a twin-turboprop of the Uruguayan Air Force took off from Mendoza in Argentina with 45 people on board, bound across the Andes for Santiago. Many of them were young men from the Old Christians Club rugby team of Montevideo,...
Oman Air 787-9 Grounded at Malpensa After Ramp Damage
Share this story The most expensive moment in an airliner’s day is often not in the air. It is on the ramp, when trucks, tugs, belt loaders and catering lifts crowd around a parked aircraft with minutes to spare. On the evening of Sunday, 11 October, that moment...
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