Share this story At 00:16 on 6 June 1944, a wooden glider carrying twenty-eight men hit the ground at over ninety miles an hour, tore through barbed wire, and stopped about fifty yards from a bridge over the Caen Canal. It had been cast off from a bomber at 7,000 feet...
Share this story Gander sits in the middle of Newfoundland, in spruce and bog, a long way from anywhere. In 2001 fewer than ten thousand people lived there. Its airport had four runways built for a different era, when piston airliners needed to stop for fuel before...
Share this story Nearly everyone was aboard. A hundred and eighty-eight people were flying home to Brussels from the Bulgarian coast, boarding was almost finished, and the last busload of passengers was being driven out to the aircraft. The bus touched the wing. Not...
Share this story You can learn a surprising amount about a secret aeroplane from the buildings people put up for it. On 10 September 2026, the US Army Corps of Engineers awarded Conti Federal Services a $74.8 million contract to build a radio frequency and...
Share this story Sweden has roughly ten million people and builds its own fighter aircraft. It has done so, without interruption, since the 1940s. That is a peculiar and slightly improbable national habit, and on 9 September 2026 Stockholm quietly paid to keep it...
Share this story Every airline maintenance manager on earth felt a small twinge of recognition on Tuesday afternoon. An emergency escape slide inflated on the ground, with nobody evacuating, because somebody moved a door handle in the wrong sequence. It is one of the...
Share this story The most expensive part of the biggest conventional bomb in the American inventory is not the explosive. It is the pipe it lives in. On 10 September 2026 the US Air Force awarded a combined $149 million to four companies to keep making those pipes:...
Share this story A ramjet has no moving parts and no way of starting itself. It works by ramming air into a duct so fast that the compression alone is enough to burn fuel usefully, which means that at zero knots on a runway it is an expensively shaped tube of nothing....
Share this story Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled...
Share this story The Netherlands is buying one aeroplane. That sounds like a rounding error in a defence budget, and it is arguably the most interesting procurement decision in European air power this month. On 10 September 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and Saab...
Share this story Novy Urengoy sits above the Arctic Circle’s shoulder in northwestern Siberia, roughly 3,000 kilometres from the nearest Ukrainian territory. It is not a front line. It is not near one. It is the unofficial gas capital of the Russian Federation,...
Share this story The plan was to take off at 8:15 in the morning, roughly the minute United 175 left Boston Logan, and to be over United’s Flight Training Center at 9:03, the exact minute that aircraft struck the South Tower. A Boeing 777 in United colours,...
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