Share this story There are more than 1,800 decommissioned oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. Most of them are rusting. Some are slowly being dismantled. A few are being turned into artificial reefs. And now the United States Air Force wants to turn some of them into...
Share this story It looks like a shipping container. The kind you see stacked on cargo ships, sitting in port yards, or riding the back of a flatbed truck. Twenty feet long, corrugated steel, anonymous. You could drive past a thousand of them without a second glance....
Share this story On 19 January 1995, a tiny piece of ice formed on the wrong piece of metal and destroyed one of the two aircraft at the heart of a pioneering German-American research programme. The piece of ice was perhaps half a centimetre across. The piece of metal...
Share this story For four short years in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Navy operated the strangest aerial-refuelling tanker it ever owned. It was a four-engined turboprop flying boat. It landed on water. It nose-loaded vehicles. It could refuel four jet fighters...
Share this story Most aircraft are designed around an engine. Some are designed around a payload. The Edgley EA-7 Optica is the only certified aircraft in aviation history designed around a view. Every other consideration — speed, range, payload, looks —...
Share this story On 4 September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft ever built in Britain took off on its maiden flight from Filton, near Bristol. It had a wingspan of 70 metres — longer than a Boeing 747’s. Eight engines, buried in the wings in pairs,...
Share this story Everyone making eVTOLs — Joby, Archer, Lilium’s ghost, Volocopter’s ghost, Eve, Vertical Aerospace — faces the same problem nobody wants to talk about: even if you successfully build the aircraft, where, exactly, does it land...
Share this story On the morning of 8 May 2026, a Garuda Indonesia A330-900neo — registration PK-GHI — lifted out of Jeddah on flight GA4208 to Medan, Indonesia, carrying Hajj pilgrims home. The routing crosses the Arabian Sea and southern India before...
Share this story In the 1960s, American spy satellites scanning the Caspian Sea brought back pictures of something that should not have existed: a 92-metre, jet-powered hybrid of ship and aircraft, skimming the water at 500 km/h. The CIA called it the Caspian Sea...
Share this story A wing is the most consequential geometry in nature. Whether it is the rachis-and-vane of a feather, the chitin-and-membrane of an insect, or the aluminium-and-composite of an aircraft, the same equation has to balance the same forces: lift against...
Share this story The Bell AH-1 Cobra is the most consequential helicopter design in American military history. Before the Cobra, every armed helicopter in the world was a transport airframe with weapons bolted onto it — a Huey with door guns, a Mi-4 with rocket pods,...
Share this story Qatar Airways finished its 2025/26 financial year with a net profit of US$1.94 billion. It is the highest annual profit in the airline’s history. The carrier moved 41.8 million passengers, 1.43 million tons of cargo, and a 12% share of the...
Recent Comments