Share this story On 18 November 1947 a test pilot took off from San Diego in a car with an aeroplane bolted to the roof, and discovered somewhere over the mud flats that he had almost no aviation fuel on board. He had checked the fuel gauge before departure. It was...
Share this story On 1 July 2026, fifty-four aircraft and helicopters went over Stockholm Castle in formation, from JAS 39 Gripens to warbirds older than most of the people watching. Sweden’s air force had turned a hundred. It is a strange centenary to write about,...
Share this story The object was less than a millimetre long on the print. It sat on a photograph of a sandy peninsula in the Baltic, among thousands of other specks, and a woman in a Buckinghamshire country house looked at it through a magnifying glass and worked out...
Share this story The US Air Force has finally put a month on the T-7A. August 2027, fourteen aircraft, one squadron. After a programme that has slipped so often the dates stopped meaning much, that is a surprisingly specific thing to say out loud. Lt. Gen. Clark...
Share this story An airliner fuselage contains something in the order of a million rivets. Each one is a hole drilled through the skin, which is to say a stress concentration deliberately introduced into a pressure vessel, repeated a million times. A welded fuselage...
Share this story Airlines are not short of passengers. They are short of cheap fuel, and the first thing that breaks is the flight that was only ever marginally worth operating. At the Morgan Stanley Laguna Conference on 16 September, American Airlines chief executive...
Share this story The US Space Force is the smallest armed service the United States has ever fielded. It is now planning to more than double, and the number it has quietly put on that ambition is bigger than the word “double” suggests. At the Air &...
Share this story A medium-altitude, long-endurance drone landed on a dirt track that tanks drive down, in the middle of a live-fire range, while a simulated battle was going on around it. Then it took off again and carried on with the mission. General Atomics...
Share this story Ukraine says it destroyed six Russian aircraft in one night, on the ground, at an airfield 160 kilometres from the front line. If the claim holds, it is among the heaviest single-night losses Russia has taken at one air base since the invasion began....
Share this story Lufthansa has spent forty years as one of the most reliably Airbus-shaped airlines in Europe. On Wednesday evening its supervisory board signed off on twenty more Boeings — and specifically on the biggest 737 ever built. The Lufthansa Group is...
Share this story An F-16 Fighting Falcon belonging to the 149th Fighter Wing of the Texas Air National Guard came down in rural northern Michigan on Thursday afternoon. The pilot ejected and was recovered alive. That last sentence is the story. Everything else is...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
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