Vortex Generators: The Little Fins That Fix Big Wing Problems
Share this story Take a window seat over the wing of a Boeing 737 Next Generation and look just outboard of the engine. A short row of small blades stands on the upper skin, each angled across the airflow like a miniature keel. Passengers photograph them, post the...
Vapor Cone Explained: Why the White Cloud Is Not the Sound Barrier
Share this story On 7 July 1999, Ensign John Gay was on the highest deck of the aircraft carrier USS Constellation when an F/A-18C Hornet tore past wrapped in a white bell of cloud. The nose and canopy were clear. The rest of the jet seemed to be bursting out of a...
Leo Thorsness: The Wild Weasel Who Took On Most of North Vietnam
Share this story The fuel gauge read empty when the runway at Udorn, just across the Mekong in Thailand, came up in front of the nose. Maj. Leo Thorsness had pulled his F-105F back to idle with 70 miles to go, by his own account, and glided in. In the back seat, his...
Epic E1000 AX Autoland Certified, With Buttons Across the Cabin
Share this story On a single-pilot flight, one medical emergency in the left seat can leave everyone else aboard in an aircraft none of them can fly. Garmin’s answer, unveiled in 2019, is Autoland: press a button and the avionics handle everything from choosing...
Red Sprites: The Lightning Above Storms Pilots Reported for Decades
Share this story For decades, some pilots who flew near big thunderstorms at night came home with a story they were reluctant to tell. Above the storm, well above the cloud tops where lightning has no business being, they had seen flashes of light shooting upward into...
Throwback Thursday: When MiGFlug Flew the MiG-25, MiG-31 and Su-27
Share this story It is Thursday, so we did something we rarely do: we went back through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and read our own old websites. The oldest copy of migflug.com it holds dates from February 2005. Its page title was “MiG Flights...
Every U-2 Shot Down: The Seven Spy Planes Lost to Missiles
Share this story The Lockheed U-2 was built around one idea: fly high enough and nobody can touch you. At 70,000 feet in the mid-1950s, that was true. No Soviet fighter could climb that high and stay there, and the first generation of Soviet missiles could not reach...
Eric Slover: The Night Stalker Who Held His Chinook Under Fire
Share this story On the night of 3 January 2026, the first helicopter into one of the most sensitive raids in recent American history was an Army MH-47 Chinook flown by Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover. Minutes later he had four bullets in his leg. Seven weeks...
Stratolaunch Roc: The Widest Aircraft Ever Flown, Now a Hypersonic Mothership
Share this story On the morning of 13 April 2019, the widest aircraft ever built rolled down the runway at Mojave in California, lifted two fuselages and six engines off the ground, and flew for two and a half hours. Its wings stretched 385 feet from tip to tip, wider...
JF-17 Thunder: The Pakistan-China Fighter That Keeps Finding Buyers
Share this story Not every successful fighter needs to be the best in the world. Some just need to be good enough, affordable and available. The JF-17 Thunder, built jointly by Pakistan and China, has turned that formula into an export success, and this year it became...
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