Aeroflot VP-BOE: 1,650 Days Parked at Geneva, CHF 1.6 Million
The aeroplane was ready to go. Fully fuelled, passengers in their seats, catering loaded, doors about to close. It was a Sunday afternoon in Geneva and the Aeroflot A321 had landed from Moscow only a couple of hours earlier. Then the European Union closed its airspace...
Citation Latitude TC-AKF: A Nearly New Jet Burns at Misrata
The aeroplane was a few months old. It was empty except for the three people flying it, on a short hop across the Mediterranean to collect passengers in Libya. It was a routine positioning flight, the kind that happens a thousand times a morning across the business...
The Indian Air Force Flew a Helicopter Dressed as an Elephant
Somewhere in the 1970s, on a January morning in New Delhi, an elephant flew down Rajpath. It was a HAL Chetak, the Indian licence-built version of the French Aérospatiale Alouette III, belonging to No. 116 Helicopter Unit of the Indian Air Force. A tailor had...
Vilnius Airport: NATO Scrambled a Typhoon at a Flock of Birds
At one minute to one on Sunday afternoon, phones across Vilnius lit up telling people to get to shelter. The airport stopped accepting arrivals and departures. A fighter launched from Siauliai, 185 kilometres to the north-west, and went looking for whatever had...
Amazon Cuts Off 21 Air After the Miami 767 Overrun Killed Five
In commercial aviation, the customer almost never fires the airline. Shippers and carriers are bound together by long contracts, aircraft leases, crew bases and slot allocations, and the whole arrangement is built to survive bad weeks. Investigations take a year or...
airBaltic Files Chapter 11: €350 Million to Keep Flying
airBaltic does not fly to the United States. It never has. Its aircraft are Canadian-built, its shareholders are Latvian and German, its passengers are overwhelmingly European, and its longest route tops out somewhere around the Gulf. On Monday it walked into a...
The Morphing Wing Already Flew, in 1985, on an F-111
A reel doing the rounds this week promises that the days of heavy mechanical flaps are numbered, and that flexible composite wings which morph in flight are about to arrive and change everything. Smooth wings that bend instead of hinging, no gaps, less drag, less...
NATO Jets Shoot Down a Drone Over Lithuania
Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, NATO fighter aircraft shot down an unidentified drone in Lithuanian airspace. It came down near the village of Pratkūnai, in Kaunas County in the centre of the country. The Lithuanian authorities logged the engagement at 01:19...
Squawk Codes Explained: 1200, 7000, 7400 and 7777
Type “what does squawk 7700 mean” into a search box and you get a correct answer in five seconds. Type “what does squawk 2303 mean” and you get a page of confident nonsense. That asymmetry is the most interesting thing about transponder codes....
Flaps and Slats: How a Jet Changes the Shape of Its Own Wing
A wing optimised for cruising at 500 knots is a bad wing for landing at 140. It is too small, too flat and too efficient. The aeroplane needs a different wing for the last three minutes of the flight, and rather than carry two, it grows one. That is what flaps and...
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