The Warplane Germany Built Lopsided on Purpose
Share this story Some aircraft look wrong. The Blohm & Voss BV 141 looks impossible. The crew sits in a glazed pod on one side; the engine and the entire tail are on the other, joined by a stub of wing. It is as if someone took half of two different aeroplanes...
Taiwan and Washington, Connected Nonstop
Share this story On 26 June, an EVA Air Boeing 787 will lift off from Taipei, point its nose east, and not come down until it reaches Washington Dulles. It sounds routine. It is, in fact, a first: there has never been a nonstop flight between Taiwan and the capital of...
Canada to West Africa, Nonstop at Last
Share this story For as long as anyone could remember, getting from Montreal to Dakar meant flying the wrong way first. North-east to Paris or Brussels, a layover, then back south to Senegal — a journey of twelve hours or more to reach a city that sits almost due east...
Airbus Flies the World’s Longest-Range Airliner
Share this story On the morning of 2 June, a pale green, primer-coated jet lifted off from Toulouse and climbed past 41,000 feet over the south of France. It carried no passengers, only test instrumentation and a hand-picked Airbus crew. It also carried a title: the...
306 Souls, Two Dead Engines, One Glide
Share this story It is just after two in the morning over the mid-Atlantic, and the cockpit of an Airbus A330 has gone quiet in the worst possible way. No engine hum. No thrust. Just the thin whistle of air over an airframe weighing more than 180 tonnes, sinking...
The Flying Whales That Built Apollo
Share this story On a September morning in 1962, the air traffic controllers at Van Nuys Airport made a phone call. They told the local police and fire departments to stand by. Out on the ramp sat the most absurd aeroplane anyone there had ever seen — a Boeing...
Missing 25 Feet of Wing, He Landed It
Share this story At 11,000 feet over the wooded hills north of New York City, on a grey December afternoon, two airliners that were never supposed to meet found themselves on a converging path. Within seconds the tip of a Boeing 707’s left wing sliced through...
Montreal Just Got a Whole New Airport
Share this story At 7 a.m. on 15 June 2026, a Porter Airlines Embraer E195-E2 rolled toward the runway at a South Shore airfield that had not seen a scheduled airline departure in living memory. As flight PD181 lined up for Vancouver, the airport fire trucks arched a...
Amazon’s Delivery Drones Just Left the US
Share this story In a back garden in Darlington, a 40-kilo aircraft drops out of the County Durham sky, hovers about four metres up, releases a shoebox-sized parcel onto the lawn, and climbs away again. No van. No driver. No knock on the door. Just a tube of mascara,...
The $9 Billion Jet That Never Flew a Passenger
Share this story It flew. That is the strangest, most expensive part of the whole story. The Mitsubishi SpaceJet was not a paper aeroplane or a CGI fantasy that died on a designer’s screen. It rolled out, it taxied, it rotated off the runway at Nagoya, and it...
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