San Jose Plane Crash: Cessna Cardinal Nosedives Onto an Expressway
Share this story It was a little after three on Saturday afternoon in East San Jose when a small propeller plane came down nose-first onto the roadway near Capitol Expressway and Excalibur Drive. The aircraft crumpled. Somehow, all three people inside survived: two...
Salt Lake City’s MiG-21 Will Be Scrapped at The Leonardo
Share this story For ten years, a Cold War fighter hung in the air over downtown Salt Lake City. Visitors to The Leonardo looked up and saw a former Polish Air Force MiG-21, red-and-white checkerboard on its tail, flying above a gleaming Convair C-131 Samaritan. Now...
Lufthansa A340-600 Retires: D-AIHW Flies the Final LH419
Share this story At Frankfurt on Monday morning, a very long white airliner rolled out on the runway, slowed, and turned off for the last time with passengers aboard. Lufthansa flight LH419 from Washington Dulles had landed on schedule after eight hours and five...
Lithuania Drone Was a Ukrainian FP-1 Aimed at St Petersburg
Share this story On Sunday morning, people in northern Lithuania were told to take shelter. An unidentified drone was crossing the country, NATO fighters were climbing to find it, and nobody yet knew whose it was. Then it came down near the village of Juodžionys and...
Austrian Airlines OS82: Bomb Threat, MiG-29 Escort, Landing in Sofia
Share this story The Austrian Airlines A320 was two hours out of Tel Aviv on Sunday evening, with 51 passengers in the cabin and Vienna still more than an hour away, when the crew received the message every airline crew dreads: a bomb threat against their flight. They...
MOAB: The “Mother of All Bombs” Explained
Share this story It is too big for a bomber. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, better known by its unofficial name, the “Mother of All Bombs”, weighs nearly ten tonnes and is pulled out of the rear cargo door of a C-130 by a parachute. It has been...
United Airlines Flight 811: The Cargo Door That Tore Open a 747 Over the Pacific
Share this story United Airlines Flight 811 left Honolulu for Auckland and Sydney at 01:52 local time on 24 February 1989, a Boeing 747-100 carrying 337 passengers and 18 crew. About seventeen minutes later, climbing between 22,000 and 23,000 feet, the jet was rocked...
Starfighters Space to Captive-Carry Test Starlaunch 1 on an F-104 in December
Share this story The F-104 Starfighter first flew in 1954. Seventy-two years later, a small fleet of them in Florida is being turned into a launch platform. Starfighters Space, which operates the world’s largest civil fleet of F-104s, has announced that it will...
Fat Albert: The Blue Angels’ C-130J Workhorse
Share this story Six blue-and-gold jets get the screams. But before any of them roll down the runway, somebody has to haul the spare parts, the tool chests and about 40 people to the show. For more than half a century, that somebody has been a big, blue,...
Ben T. Epps: Georgia’s First Aviator and His Homemade Monoplanes
Share this story The first attempt failed. On the second, a homemade monoplane built from sawmill scrap and cotton rolled down a slope in Athens, Georgia, lifted 40 to 50 feet into the air, flew about 100 yards and crashed, losing both wings. The local editor T. W....
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