Share this story A routine short hop from Amsterdam ended with a moment that was caught on two live airport cameras. On the morning of Thursday 12 November 2026, British Airways flight BA431, an Airbus A321neo registered G-TNEB, bounced on landing on runway 27L at...
Share this story In February 1962, Mao Zedong received an unexpected letter from Nikita Khrushchev. Two years after the Sino-Soviet split had led Moscow to withdraw its advisers from China, the Soviet leader was offering Beijing the technology for the most modern...
Share this story In 1964, China’s aircraft designers faced a problem they could not buy their way out of. The country’s best fighter, the J-7, a home-built copy of the MiG-21, lacked the range and altitude performance to catch high-flying bombers and...
Share this story Somewhere over West Pakistan in December 1971, a missile fired by a Pakistani fighter slammed into the tail of an Indian Sukhoi Su-7. The blast carried away half the rudder and wrecked the elevators, ailerons and flaps. Wing Commander H.S. Mangat,...
Share this story Over the airfield at Jodhpur on 27 December 2019, five grey jets with wings swept back came over in an arrowhead, flanked by Su-30MKIs. When they landed, the Indian Air Force had retired its last MiG-27, and with it its last swing-wing jet. In India...
Share this story The first Tejas Mk1A was supposed to reach the Indian Air Force in February 2024. Almost three years later, the IAF may finally get one in January 2027, just weeks before India’s biggest air show opens in Bengaluru. That is the claim of an...
Share this story “Why am I seeing sky all of a sudden?” That was the thought in the co-pilot’s head, he later told investigators, a second or two after his captain called “go around” on a bounced landing at London Heathrow. By then the...
Share this story Ask a hundred passengers what a jet engine is designed to do when it swallows a large bird, and ninety-nine will say: keep running. It is a reasonable assumption. It is also wrong, and the regulation says so in plain English. Under 14 CFR 33.76, the...
Share this story Shortly before sunset on 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727 began to move at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola. There was no call to the tower. It manoeuvred erratically, entered a runway without clearance and, with its lights off and its...
Share this story Every new aeroplane, engine and propeller certificated in the United States arrives with a stack of maintenance instructions written by its manufacturer. Thousands of pages of servicing data, troubleshooting trees, torque values and inspection...
Share this story Sometime around 1978, a silver Soviet bomber with a red star on its tail swept low past the American destroyer USS Hewitt, close enough for a Navy photographer to fill the frame with it. Scenes like that were routine for three decades. Wherever the US...
Share this story Next time you walk past an airliner engine on the stand, look past the fan blades at the wall of the intake. That smooth grey surface is not smooth at all. Up close it is peppered with thousands of tiny holes, as regular as the perforations on a sheet...
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