How Much Runway Does a 747 Need? 737, 777 and A380 Compared
Type the question into a search engine and you get a number. A 747 needs 10,000 feet. Or 3,000 metres. Or 8,000 feet. The numbers disagree with each other, none of them cite anything, and all of them are answering a question that does not really exist. There is no...
Supermarine Attacker: The Navy Jet With a Tail Wheel
The Royal Navy’s first jet fighter had a tail wheel. Two of them, in fact, tucked under the rear fuselage, so that the aircraft sat on the deck nose-high like a Spitfire. Every jet you can picture has a nosewheel, for the obvious reason that a jet pointing at...
Boulton Paul P.111: Britain’s Yellow Peril Delta
Britain came out of the Second World War with a captured German idea it did not fully understand. The delta wing promised high speed and a strong, light structure, and the Germans had been drawing them for years. Nobody in Britain knew what one actually felt like to...
SWISS A350: The Third Jet Lands, Seven Still to Come
Swiss has a third Airbus A350. According to aeroTELEGRAPH, HB-IFC arrived in Zurich on 12 September, joining the two A350-900s already in the fleet and continuing the slowest, most consequential fleet change the airline has made in twenty years. Three aircraft out of...
Japan CH-47s: The JSDF’s First Overseas Firefighting Mission
A Japanese landing ship arrived in West Kalimantan this week with three CH-47 Chinooks and around 300 people on board. According to the Associated Press, it is the first known overseas firefighting operation the Japan Self-Defense Forces have ever conducted. For a...
Mayday, Pan-Pan and Squawk 7700: What Pilots Say on the Radio
A controller is working a busy approach frequency. Four aircraft are talking over one another about runway changes and speed restrictions. Then one voice comes through, flat and unhurried, and says a single word three times. Everyone else stops transmitting. Nobody...
Turbulent Turtle: The First Shootdown of the Cold War
At 10:31 Greenwich time on 8 April 1950, a United States Navy Privateer lifted off from Wiesbaden and turned for the Baltic. Ten men were aboard. None of them came back, and no trace of any of them has ever been found. The aircraft was called Turbulent Turtle. Nobody...
Hüfifirn: A Swiss Glacier Gives Back a Plane Lost in 1963
A walker in the Swiss canton of Uri came across something metallic lying on the ice near the Hüfifirn glacier and called the police. The police called the accident investigators. The investigators confirmed it was light alloy from an aircraft. Then came the part...
Vietravel Airlines Signs a Letter of Intent for 50 Airbus Jets
Vietravel Airlines has been building its own fleet for about fifteen months. It owns a small handful of Airbus A321s. Its international network consists of two routes. On 10 September 2026, in the Salon at the Élysée Palace and in front of the French...
REGENT Viceroy: The Electric Seaglider That Flies as a Boat
On 2 September 2026, a large white machine with twelve propellers lifted off the surface of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, climbed to ten metres, flew 596 metres in about thirty seconds, and settled back onto the water. Two people were on board. Neither of them was...
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