Stargazer: The Last Flying L-1011 TriStar Still Launches Rockets
Share this story Most TriStars were scrapped long ago. One is still working. Stargazer, a 52-year-old Lockheed L-1011 that began life carrying Air Canada passengers, now carries a rocket under its belly, climbs to about 40,000 feet and lets it go. In July 2026 it did...
Faith 7: How Gordon Cooper Flew His Mercury Capsule Home by Hand
Share this story On the final day of America’s last Mercury mission, the spacecraft’s brain went dark. One by one, the systems that were supposed to steer Faith 7 home failed. Gordon Cooper, alone in a capsule barely bigger than a telephone box, lined it...
AN/ALE-50 and BriteCloud: How Towed and Expendable Decoys Work
Share this story There is a moment in the design of every defensive electronic warfare system where the engineering stops being intuitive. You are being tracked by a radar. The obvious response is to drown that radar in noise. And the moment you do, you have told...
Dead Reckoning, LORAN and INS: How Pilots Fly Without GPS
Share this story The first sign is almost always the same. The magenta line on the navigation display does not vanish dramatically; it simply stops agreeing with itself. A position jumps a few miles sideways. The autopilot shrugs. Somewhere in the stack, a box decides...
Spitfire XIV vs P-51D Mustang: Which Was the Better Fighter?
Share this story Ask a room of warbird enthusiasts which was the best piston-engined fighter of the Second World War in Europe and you will start an argument that has been running for 80 years. Two names come up again and again: the American P-51D Mustang and the...
Restarting a Jet Engine in Flight: Windmill Starts and Core Lock
Share this story When United Airlines flight UA946 had an engine problem over the North Atlantic last weekend, early reports could not agree on whether the engine was shut down for the rest of the flight or restarted on the way to Newfoundland. Either outcome is...
Gust Locks: The Forgotten Pin That Keeps Crashing Aircraft
Share this story Every parked aircraft has a problem: wind. A gust across the ramp can slam a rudder or an elevator against its stops, damaging the control system or hurting someone nearby. The fix is simple and almost as old as aviation itself. Lock the controls....
How Long Does an Airliner Last? Flight Hours, Cycles and Fatigue
Share this story Ask how old an airliner is and you will usually get an answer in years. Ask an engineer and you will get two more numbers: how many hours it has flown, and how many times it has taken off and landed. For the structure of an aircraft, those numbers...
How Cheap Drone Interceptors Work: Sting, Coyote and Roadrunner
Share this story For most of the history of air defence, the target was worth more than the missile that killed it. A bomber, a fighter or a cruise missile cost millions, so a missile that cost hundreds of thousands was a bargain. Drones broke that arithmetic. A...
Stratospheric Spies: Balloons, Solar Gliders and Pseudo-Satellites
Share this story Between the top of the weather and the bottom of space lies a band of sky that almost nobody uses. The stratosphere, roughly 18 to 30 kilometres up for the purposes of this story, is too high for airliners and most fighters, far below satellites, and...
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