Oshkosh Just Broke Its All-Time Record
Share this story For one week every July, a regional airport in eastern Wisconsin becomes the busiest patch of sky on the planet. In 2026 it also became the most crowded it has ever been. EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2026, the annual fly-in the Experimental Aircraft...
Smoke Over the Atlantic Sends a SWISS Jet to Maine
Share this story Somewhere over the cold Atlantic off Nova Scotia, about six and a half hours into an eight-hour crossing, passengers in the front of a Zurich-to-New York flight caught the one smell nobody wants at 30,000 feet: hot electrics. Smoke was seeping into...
The Biggest Piston Plane America Ever Flew
Share this story In 1947, Convair rolled out an aircraft so large that, three-quarters of a century later, no piston-engined land transport has ever exceeded it. The XC-99 could swallow a hundred thousand pounds of cargo or four hundred troops on its two full decks,...
The Pilot Who Wrote The Little Prince and Vanished
Share this story On 31 July 1944, a twin-boomed Lightning climbed away from a dusty airfield on Corsica and turned north toward occupied France. At the controls was a 44-year-old French pilot who was really too old, too battered and too famous to be flying combat...
The Man Who Fell Through a Thunderstorm
Share this story On the afternoon of 26 July 1959, Marine Lt. Col. William Rankin was cruising at 47,000 feet when his fighter’s single engine died with a grinding shudder. He reached up, pulled the ejection handles, and blew himself out of the cockpit into air...
A New Class of Aircraft Just Became Legal
Share this story On 24 July, a rule two decades in the making rewrote what counts as a light-sport aircraft in America — and, with it, what a beginner pilot is allowed to fly. MOSAIC, the Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification, tears up the...
The FAA Ends the 5G Fight With the Cockpit
Share this story For four years a quiet turf war has run between the companies building 5G networks and the people who land airplanes. On 24 July, the FAA moved to end it. The agency is issuing a final rule requiring aircraft radio altimeters to shrug off interference...
Boeing Pips Airbus in a Subdued Farnborough
Share this story Farnborough 2026 has closed, and for once the headline is not a record. Boeing came out narrowly ahead of Airbus in the order race — but the show’s real story was how modest that race turned out to be. By Reuters’ tally, Boeing...
Buran: The Soviet Shuttle That Flew Once
Share this story On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one...
The Last Lap at Reno
Share this story For fifty-nine years, every September, the high desert north of Reno filled with a sound you felt in your chest before you heard it: the shriek of Merlin engines wound past their limits, warbirds built to kill fascism now screaming around pylons a few...
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