FAA Controller Schedules: The 2-2-1 Rattler and the 40-Hour Week
Share this story Ask an American air traffic controller whether they work a forty-hour week and you will get a straight answer: yes. Five shifts, eight hours each, exactly as the contract says.Then ask when those forty hours happen. The common answer is that all five...
IFF Explained: How Military Jets Tell Friend From Foe
Share this story On a radar screen, every aircraft looks much the same: a blip. It might be a friendly fighter coming home, an airliner, or an enemy bomber. Get it wrong one way and an enemy slips through. Get it wrong the other way and you shoot down your own people....
B-58 Escape Capsule to B-2 Ejection Seat: How Bomber Crews Get Out
Share this story On 8 December 1964, at Bunker Hill Air Force Base in Indiana, a Convair B-58 Hustler sat on the ramp going nowhere. Cranes were rigged alongside it. Then one of its three crew stations fired itself off the aeroplane on a rocket, climbed away on a...
Why Fighter Pilots Fly in Pairs: The Two-Ship and the Wingman
Share this story Watch fighters take off from almost any air base in the world and you will notice something: they rarely go alone. They roll down the runway in pairs, climb out together and fly the whole mission as a team of two. In fighter slang, that pair is a...
Redout Explained: What Negative G Does to a Pilot
Share this story Most people have heard of blacking out in a fighter jet. Pull hard, the G builds, blood drains from the head, the world goes grey and then dark. But there is an evil twin that gets far less attention, and pilots respect it just as much. Push the stick...
JP-8, JP-5 and Jet A: The Fuels Fighter Jets Burn
Share this story Walk up to a fighter jet after a sortie and the smell hits you before anything else: warm kerosene. To most people, jet fuel is just jet fuel. To air forces and navies, it is a family of carefully specified liquids with names like JP-8, JP-5 and F-24,...
Combat Air Patrol Explained: What a CAP Is and Why Fighters Orbit
Share this story Not every fighter mission is a dash to a target. A lot of the time, fighter pilots fly in circles. They take off, climb to a patch of sky, and orbit there for hours, burning fuel, refuelling from tankers and watching their radar. Nothing happens, and...
TACAN Explained: How Military Jets Find Their Way Home
Share this story A fighter pilot coming home in bad weather wants to know two things: which direction is base, and how far away is it. For more than seventy years, the answer in military cockpits has come from a system with a slightly clumsy name: TACAN, short for...
Jimmy Doolittle’s Blind Flight: The 1929 Landing Made on Instruments
Share this story On 24 September 1929, Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle climbed into the rear cockpit of a biplane at Mitchel Field on Long Island, and somebody pulled a canvas hood over his head. From that moment he could see nothing outside. He could see only a handful of...
Pan Am Flight 6: The 1956 Pacific Ditching Where All 31 Survived
Share this story In the middle of the night, halfway between Honolulu and San Francisco, the Boeing Stratocruiser Clipper Sovereign of the Skies lost two of its four engines. It was too far from land to make it either way. So for hours, its crew flew circles in the...
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