Share this story Three de Havilland DH.108 Swallows were ever built. Each one, in turn, killed the man flying it. That is not a curse or a legend — it is simply the record of one of the most beautiful and lethal experimental aircraft Britain ever put into the...
Share this story Imagine strapping into a fighter, climbing to altitude, and then flying straight at a bomber whose gunners have been ordered to open fire on you. Not blanks. Not a camera. Real bullets, aimed at your aircraft, on purpose. Now imagine doing it two or...
Share this story Airlines love a big number. Turkish Airlines just posted one that is hard to argue with: on Sunday, 2 August 2026, the group flew 352,715 passengers in a single day — the busiest day in its 93-year history. That figure is not one airline but two...
Share this story It looked like a punchline — a helicopter with its fuselage bent upward in the middle like a piece of fruit, a fat rotor spinning at each end. Soldiers called it the Flying Banana, and they meant it with affection. But the Piasecki H-21 was no...
Share this story On a June afternoon in 1988, in front of thousands of airshow spectators, a brand-new Airbus A320 — the most advanced airliner in the world, on its very first passenger flight — flew a slow, low pass over a small French airfield, sank...
Share this story Most water bombers are propeller aircraft, and for good reason: they fly low and slow over fires, scooping and dropping in tight mountain valleys. The Beriev Be-200 does it all on jet power. It skims a lake at nearly 220 km/h, swallows 12 tonnes of...
Share this story On a freezing January evening in 1989, a nearly new Boeing 737 fell out of the sky less than a kilometre short of the runway and struck the embankment of the M1 motorway. Forty-seven of the 126 people on board died. The cruel twist: the engine that...
Share this story A four-engine bomber the length of a swimming pool, painted brilliant white, rolls onto the runway. Its wings are stretched forward like a bird’s. Then four of the most powerful engines ever bolted to a warplane light their afterburners, and...
Share this story On August 9, an Etihad Airways Airbus A320 lifted out of Abu Dhabi bound for Tashkent, reopening a link to the old Silk Road — and, with it, an entire country’s worth of onward connections. The new daily nonstop is only half the story....
Share this story Hollywood Burbank Airport is the little airport that Angelenos love precisely because it is not LAX. Two terminals, a walk across the tarmac to the stairs, quick hops to Las Vegas and the Bay Area. It is not the sort of place you associate with a...
Share this story In 1913, while the rest of the world was still coaxing flimsy single-engine biplanes into the air for a few shaky minutes, a 24-year-old Russian rolled out an aircraft with four engines, a heated passenger lounge, electric lighting, and a washroom. It...
Share this story In January 1942, a month after Pearl Harbor, a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams sat down and wrote a letter to the White House. His plan to win the war was simple: strap tiny incendiary bombs to a million bats and drop them on Tokyo.It should...
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