Rare P-40C Warhawk Belly-Lands in a Field Near Royston
The Fighter Collection at Duxford flies aeroplanes that most museums would bolt to a plinth. Late last month one of the rarest of them had an engine problem on a maintenance check flight and ended up on its belly in a field northwest of Royston. The pilot was not...
Turkish Airlines A340 Turned Science Centre Destroyed by Fire
Almost every retired airliner ends the same way. It sits in a desert or a Turkish boneyard, the engines come off, the useful parts are stripped, and what is left goes through a shredder. TC-JDL got a second life instead. The Airbus A340-311 was cut up, loaded onto...
Air India A320neo Lost All Three Hydraulic Systems at 36,000 Feet
The Airbus A320 has three hydraulic systems, and they are separate on purpose. Green, blue and yellow. Three reservoirs, three pressure sources, no fluid shared between them. The architecture exists so that no single failure can take away the flight controls. On 4...
Vickers V.1000: The British Jet Airliner Scrapped 80% Built
In November 1955 the British government cancelled a four-engined jet transport that was around 80 percent built, on the grounds that nobody in Britain wanted it. Eleven months later the same government approved the purchase of fifteen Boeing 707s for its state...
Turkish Airlines 981: The Cargo Door That Killed 346 People
The most important document in this story is a memo. It was written on 27 June 1972 by an engineer named Dan Applegate, it ran to a few pages, and it said clearly what was going to happen. Twenty months later it happened. Three hundred and forty-six people died in a...
Japan Airlines and Korean Air Deepen a 60-Year Partnership
Two flag carriers that have been quietly cooperating since the early 1960s signed a new agreement in Seoul on 3 September. On its own that would barely register. The timing is what makes it interesting. In fourteen weeks, Asiana Airlines ceases to exist. On 17...
HAP-alpha: DLR’s 138-Kilogram Solar Aircraft Takes Off
An aircraft with three quarters the wingspan of an Airbus A320 and the weight of two adults took off from a runway in Saxony-Anhalt on 2 September, flew a wide, careful circuit for seventy minutes, and landed again. It never went higher than 180 metres. That is not a...
ICAO Warns 193 States: Airliners Are Being Targeted Again
A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the missiles know what...
Global Airlines Faces a Winding-Up Petition as Its A380 Sits Idle
There is an Airbus A380 sitting in the sun at Tarbes, in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It has been there since 16 July 2025. It is painted for an airline that has flown four flights in its entire existence, holds no air operator’s certificate, and is now defending...
The Best Fighter Jet in the World? It Is Not That Simple
Share this story It is the question we get asked more than any other, and it is the one question about fighter aircraft that has no honest single answer. The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that “best” is four or five different questions...
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