airBaltic Files Chapter 11: €350 Million to Keep Flying
Share this story 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...
The Morphing Wing Already Flew, in 1985, on an F-111
Share this story 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,...
NATO Jets Shoot Down a Drone Over Lithuania
Share this story 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...
Squawk Codes Explained: 1200, 7000, 7400 and 7777
Share this story 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...
Flaps and Slats: How a Jet Changes the Shape of Its Own Wing
Share this story 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...
Angle of Attack and the Stall: Why Wings Stop Working
Share this story There is one sentence that, properly understood, prevents a large fraction of fatal loss-of-control accidents. The US Federal Aviation Administration puts it like this: “It is possible to exceed the critical AOA at any airspeed, at any attitude,...
How Does an Aircraft Fly? Lift, Weight, Thrust and Drag
Share this story Almost everyone who has been told how a wing works has been told something wrong. The explanation goes like this: the top of the wing is curved and the bottom is flat, so air going over the top has further to travel, so it must go faster to meet up...
FAR 91.211: How Long Can You Fly Without Oxygen?
Share this story Ask how long a pilot can fly without oxygen and you get two answers that do not resemble each other. The legal answer lives in 14 CFR 91.211, and at 12,000 feet it is remarkably relaxed: fly all day. The physiological answer comes from the FAA’s...
Fiat G.55 Centauro: Italy’s Best Fighter, Built Too Late
Share this story In February 1943 a German evaluation commission arrived at the Italian flight test centre at Guidonia with an Fw 190A-5 and a Bf 109G-4, and spent several weeks flying them against three new Italian fighters. The head of the commission, Oberst...
Su-30MKI: Why the Indian Air Force Flies With Two Crew
Share this story Line up the world’s major air forces and count the seats. The United States Air Force flies the F-22, the F-16 and the F-35 with one pilot. The F-35 has no two-seat variant in any version, for any customer. France flies mostly single-seat Rafales....
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