Share this story It is 0200 hours in the Eastern Mediterranean. The flight deck of USS Gerald R. Ford smells faintly of jet fuel and seawater. A yellow-shirted Air Boss raises an arm. Three hundred feet of catapult — not steam, not for the first time in U.S. naval...
Share this story The Airbus A220 has been the most underestimated commercial airliner of the past decade — a Canadian-designed jet (originally the Bombardier C Series) that quietly piled up loyal customers and stellar dispatch reliability while the headlines went to...
Share this story Before the rockets. Before the electric cars became mainstream. Before Mars, before the tunnels, before the social media platform — there was a young South African entrepreneur in the Nevada desert, strapped into the cockpit of a Cold War-era jet,...
Share this story Somewhere in a strip-mall medical office, a prospective airline pilot is peeing into a cup, squinting at eye charts, and trying not to think about the fact that their entire career — years of training, tens of thousands of dollars in flight school...
Share this story Brazil doesn’t always get credit for aerospace excellence. But on May 8, 2026, Embraer — headquartered in Sao Jose dos Campos — posted the best first quarter in its history. Revenue: $1.4 billion. Growth: 31% year-on-year. Operating profit: up...
Share this story Every profession has its internal language — the private jokes, the eye-rolls, the sarcastic notes passed between colleagues who understand each other completely. In aviation, that language lives in the aircraft logbook. Specifically, in the...
Share this story On the evening of 27 May 1919, a lumbering four-engine flying boat descended through the Atlantic haze and touched down on the Tagus Estuary outside Lisbon, Portugal. Its hull was salt-stained. Its crew of six had not slept properly in two days. And...
Share this story Atlas Air is the world’s largest operator of Boeing 747 freighters. The carrier flies more 747-8Fs and 747-400s than any other airline on Earth. The 747 is, in many ways, the brand. So when Atlas walks into Toulouse and signs a $7-billion order...
Share this story The aircraft is the size of a Cessna 172 but flies itself. There is no pilot. There is no cockpit. There is no second seat for an emergency manual override. Pyka’s Pelican Cargo just took off, flew a 200-kilometre route over central California,...
In 1936, American Airlines president C.R. Smith made an audacious request to Donald Douglas: build an airliner that could carry passengers across America in 16 hours and make money doing it. The result was the Douglas DC-3 — an aircraft so well-designed that it...
He failed five times. Each time, he climbed into a capsule smaller than a garden shed, was lifted to 35,000 feet by a balloon the size of a 14-storey building, and tried to navigate the unpredictable jet streams around the entire planet. Each time, weather, equipment...
On New Year’s Day 1914, a crowd gathered on the waterfront in St. Petersburg, Florida, to watch history. A Benoist XIV flying boat — a wood-and-canvas biplane with a pusher propeller and a hull designed to land on water — taxied out across Tampa Bay. In the...
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