Share this story On 10 January 1964, a B-52H Stratofortress flown by a Boeing test crew on a structural test flight near East Spanish Peak in southern Colorado when it flew into the worst clear-air turbulence anyone aboard had ever experienced. There was no warning,...
Share this story It was the fastest fighter at low level in the Royal Air Force inventory, faster than the Spitfire below 15,000 feet. It carried four 20mm cannons in its nose — twice the firepower of any other British fighter. It first flew in October 1938 and...
Share this story The aircraft sits on its tail in the hangar. The pilot climbs a ladder, then climbs another, until he is sitting almost flat on his back, looking straight up at the hangar ceiling. He starts the twin-section Allison turboprop driving its 16-foot...
Share this story Glue two P-51 Mustangs together along the wing. Share a tailplane between them. Put the radio operator’s seat in the right fuselage. Tell the pilot in the left fuselage to fly the aircraft. The result is the F-82 Twin Mustang — the longest-range...
Share this story Atlas Air is the world’s largest operator of Boeing 747 freighters. The carrier flies more 747-8Fs and 747-400s than any other airline on Earth. The 747 is, in many ways, the brand. So when Atlas walks into Toulouse and signs a $7-billion order...
Share this story The aircraft is the size of a Cessna 172 but flies itself. There is no pilot. There is no cockpit. There is no second seat for an emergency manual override. Pyka’s Pelican Cargo just took off, flew a 200-kilometre route over central California,...
Share this story The General Electric J85 first ran on a test stand in 1956. Eisenhower was president. The Soviets had not yet launched Sputnik. Seventy years later, the same engine — virtually unchanged in its core architecture — is being kept alive by more than $178...
Share this story Of all the strange aircraft the United States built during the Second World War — and there were many — none was stranger, on paper or in person, than the Northrop XP-79. The XP-79 has gone down in history as a manned missile. Its mission, so the...
Share this story The standard British Quick Reaction Alert intercept, in the Cold War era, went something like this. NATO radar would call out an unidentified contact entering the United Kingdom Air Defence Region. Two RAF Phantom FGR.2s, held at ten minutes’...
Share this story Most aviation news arrives with a roar. This one arrives with a quiet announcement that, somewhere over the cold North Atlantic, a U.S. Navy P-8A Poseidon is now flying in a configuration that can probably hear a Russian submarine before the submarine...
Share this story On the afternoon of Friday, 26 October 2001, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief, Edward “Pete” Aldridge, stepped up to a podium in Washington. Three thousand kilometres away, Boeing chairman Phil Condit and his Joint Strike Fighter boss, Frank Statkus,...
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