Thanh Hoa Bridge: The Dragon’s Jaw That Took Seven Years to Fall
Share this story Seventy miles south of Hanoi, a steel bridge 540 feet long sat on a single concrete pier in the middle of the Song Ma river. It carried the only railway in the North Vietnamese panhandle, with a road lane on either side. Locals called it Ham Rong: the...
Alaska Airlines 261: How a Lubrication Interval Grew Sevenfold
Share this story Every aeroplane has a part you have never heard of that is holding more of your life in its hands than the engines are. On a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, that part was a steel screw turning inside a nut, mounted near the top of the vertical fin. The screw...
Airworthiness Directives: The Four Types That Do Not Exist
Share this story Somewhere tonight a Boeing 737 will touch down harder than the crew intended. The cabin will jolt, a few people will say something unrepeatable, and everyone will carry on. It happens several hundred times a day somewhere in the world and it is almost...
Musashi Sinking 1944: How Carrier Planes Killed a Super-Battleship
Share this story At 10:27 on the morning of 24 October 1944, eight dive bombers from the carrier USS Intrepid tipped over above the Sibuyan Sea and went for the biggest target any of their crews had ever seen. Below them steamed Musashi, one of the two heaviest...
Trent 900 Blade-Off Test: How Rolls-Royce Proved the A380 Engine Could Contain a Fan Blade
Share this story The most violent test an airliner engine ever faces happens on the ground. With the engine running at its maximum permitted speed, a small explosive charge at the root of one fan blade cuts it loose. The blade must be stopped by the engine casing, and...
Vandy 1: The Story of VX-4’s Black Bunny Tomcat
Share this story Navy fighters are painted to disappear. VX-4’s were the exception. The Air Test and Evaluation Squadron at Point Mugu, California, flew its commander’s jet in gloss black with a white Playboy bunny on the fin, under the squadron call sign...
RAF Chinooks and A400Ms to Fight UK Wildfires From the Air
Share this story After the hottest summer Britain has ever recorded, the government has decided that some wildfires are simply out of reach for firefighters on foot. Its answer is in the hangars of the Royal Air Force: the twin-rotor CH-47 Chinook and the A400M Atlas...
Neil Armstrong’s Four Close Calls: Korea, Gemini 8, the Flying Bedstead and the Moon
Share this story When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon on 20 July 1969, he was 38 years old and had already survived more close calls than most pilots see in a career. Two ejections, a spacecraft tumbling out of control in orbit, and a landing that ended with the...
Cargolux 747-8F LX-VCF: Landing Gear Collapses While Parked
Share this story Landing gear failures usually make headlines on touchdown, at speed, with a crew fighting to keep a heavy aircraft straight. This one happened with the aircraft standing still. On Friday morning, 23 October 2026, the left wing landing gear of a...
Tom Skerritt (1933-2026): Top Gun’s Viper Was an Air Force Veteran
Share this story To a generation of fighter pilots and the millions who wanted to be one, he will always be Viper: the calm, moustached commanding officer of the Navy Fighter Weapons School in Top Gun, the man who told Maverick the truth about his father. Tom...
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