The Call-Sign Mix-Up That Stopped Flight 308
Share this story It is just after six o’clock on a Saturday evening at Miami International Airport. American Airlines Flight 308, an Airbus A319 loaded with passengers bound for Bermuda, has been cleared onto Runway 8 and is beginning to roll. Then the crew sees...
What Actually Happens Inside a Wind Tunnel
Share this story Every aircraft you have ever seen in the sky was first tested in a room where nothing flies at all. Wind tunnels are, conceptually, the simplest tools in aerospace engineering: take a tube, put air in one end, put a model in the middle, and measure...
The Bent Wingtips That Save Billions in Fuel
Share this story Sit in a window seat over the wing of almost any modern airliner and you will see it: the wingtip, instead of ending in a clean point, bends sharply upward into a fin. It looks like a small design flourish. It is not. That upturned tip is quietly one...
Air Canada Bets Big on a Smaller Jet
Share this story On the first morning of June, an Air Canada jet pushed back at Montreal and pointed its nose at Nantes, a tidy French city on the Loire that no Canadian airline had ever served nonstop. Two days later, a widebody lifted off from Toronto bound for...
A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer
Share this story A small white jet with a chequered flag down its flank taxied to a stop outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on a bright Saturday in June, and a 9-year-old’s dream from 1962 finally landed. The pilot who climbed down was Ed Noel. The aircraft...
China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus
Share this story On a Friday afternoon in Shanghai, executives from China Eastern Airlines and Airbus signed their names to a document that quietly reshapes the balance of power in the world’s most fought-over aviation market. The deal: 25 brand-new Airbus A330-900neo...
The Plane So Ugly It Ended Up in Mad Max
Share this story There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond...
He Pedaled a Plane Across the Channel
Share this story Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence...
Cathay Opens a New Door to Central Asia
Share this story Try, today, to fly from Hong Kong to Almaty. You can’t — not directly. You go the long way, connecting through the Gulf, or Istanbul, or Moscow, turning a regional hop into a day-long ordeal. From early 2027, that finally changes. Cathay...
300 Feet From Disaster at Boston Logan
Share this story A football field is 300 feet long. On the morning of 20 June 2026, that was roughly the margin between an ordinary Saturday at Boston Logan and a disaster the whole country would still be talking about. Delta Flight 2351, an Airbus A319 in from Dallas...
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