Mayday, Pan-Pan and Squawk 7700: What Pilots Say on the Radio
A controller is working a busy approach frequency. Four aircraft are talking over one another about runway changes and speed restrictions. Then one voice comes through, flat and unhurried, and says a single word three times. Everyone else stops transmitting. Nobody...
Sabena 548: The Crash That Erased a National Team
On the morning of 15 February 1961 a Sabena Boeing 707 came out of a clear sky over Belgium, circled Brussels airport three times while its crew fought it, and fell into a field at Berg, less than two miles short of the runway. Seventy-two people on board were killed,...
Flying Tiger 739: 107 People Vanished Over the Pacific
Ninety-three young American soldiers, three South Vietnamese servicemen and eleven civilian crew boarded a Super Constellation at Travis Air Force Base in March 1962 and flew west. Somewhere between Guam and the Philippines, the aeroplane stopped existing. Not a seat...
Korean Air Switches On Free Starlink Wi-Fi on 15 September
Korean Air will switch on free Starlink Wi-Fi on 15 September 2026, and in doing so becomes the first full-service airline in East Asia to put SpaceX’s low-Earth-orbit network into its cabins. It starts small: four aircraft. It is meant to finish large: most of...
Hüfifirn: A Swiss Glacier Gives Back a Plane Lost in 1963
A walker in the Swiss canton of Uri came across something metallic lying on the ice near the Hüfifirn glacier and called the police. The police called the accident investigators. The investigators confirmed it was light alloy from an aircraft. Then came the part...
Algeria Closes Its Airspace to UAE Aircraft
At midnight on 11 September 2026, Algeria closed its airspace to every civilian and military aircraft registered in the United Arab Emirates. It is the kind of announcement that sounds enormous and, in commercial terms, changes almost nothing. The UAE carrier that...
Vietravel Airlines Signs a Letter of Intent for 50 Airbus Jets
Vietravel Airlines has been building its own fleet for about fifteen months. It owns a small handful of Airbus A321s. Its international network consists of two routes. On 10 September 2026, in the Salon at the Élysée Palace and in front of the French...
REGENT Viceroy: The Electric Seaglider That Flies as a Boat
On 2 September 2026, a large white machine with twelve propellers lifted off the surface of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, climbed to ten metres, flew 596 metres in about thirty seconds, and settled back onto the water. Two people were on board. Neither of them was...
Wizz Air Strips Engines From Its Parked A321XLRs
There is a particular kind of corporate embarrassment that can only be photographed from an airport perimeter fence. At Bydgoszcz in northern Poland, a handful of nearly new Airbus A321XLRs are parked up with holes where their engines used to be. The engines have not...
Malpensa Power Bank Fire: easyJet A320 Evacuated by Slides
The safety demonstration had barely finished when the exits it describes were needed in earnest. At 17:24 on Thursday afternoon, easyJet flight U23905 pushed back from Terminal 2 at Milan Malpensa, bound for Prague with 146 passengers aboard. Seven minutes later, on a...
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