airBaltic Files Chapter 11: €350 Million to Keep Flying
Share this story airBaltic does not fly to the United States. It never has. Its aircraft are Canadian-built, its shareholders are Latvian and German, its passengers are overwhelmingly European, and its longest route tops out somewhere around the Gulf. On Monday it...
Lockheed Vectis: Four More Prototypes, First Flight 2027
Share this story The model on the show floor at National Harbor is 34 feet long and you can walk all the way around it. There is no cockpit, no canopy, no windscreen, nothing for a human head to sit behind. What there is, on top of the fuselage where an intake has no...
The Morphing Wing Already Flew, in 1985, on an F-111
Share this story A reel doing the rounds this week promises that the days of heavy mechanical flaps are numbered, and that flexible composite wings which morph in flight are about to arrive and change everything. Smooth wings that bend instead of hinging, no gaps,...
The Little Bird the Pentagon Blurred in the Dude 44 Rescue Video
Share this story When the backseater known as Dude 44 Bravo broke his silence on 60 Minutes, most of the coverage went to what he said. The more durable part of the broadcast was what it showed. Alongside the interview, CBS aired video of both rescues that had not...
Upper Heyford 1992: The F-111 Crew Who Stayed at the Controls
Share this story On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon...
NATO Jets Shoot Down a Drone Over Lithuania
Share this story Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, NATO fighter aircraft shot down an unidentified drone in Lithuanian airspace. It came down near the village of Pratkūnai, in Kaunas County in the centre of the country. The Lithuanian authorities logged the...
Squawk Codes Explained: 1200, 7000, 7400 and 7777
Share this story Type “what does squawk 7700 mean” into a search box and you get a correct answer in five seconds. Type “what does squawk 2303 mean” and you get a page of confident nonsense. That asymmetry is the most interesting thing about...
Flaps and Slats: How a Jet Changes the Shape of Its Own Wing
Share this story A wing optimised for cruising at 500 knots is a bad wing for landing at 140. It is too small, too flat and too efficient. The aeroplane needs a different wing for the last three minutes of the flight, and rather than carry two, it grows one. That is...
Angle of Attack and the Stall: Why Wings Stop Working
Share this story There is one sentence that, properly understood, prevents a large fraction of fatal loss-of-control accidents. The US Federal Aviation Administration puts it like this: “It is possible to exceed the critical AOA at any airspeed, at any attitude,...
How Does an Aircraft Fly? Lift, Weight, Thrust and Drag
Share this story Almost everyone who has been told how a wing works has been told something wrong. The explanation goes like this: the top of the wing is curved and the bottom is flat, so air going over the top has further to travel, so it must go faster to meet up...
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