Share this story Business jets are built to be quiet, smooth and economical. So a photograph of a Dassault Falcon 20 with a long cone of flame blasting out of one engine looks like a joke or a Photoshop. It is neither. In the late 1980s one Falcon 20, registered...
Share this story Ask why airliners cruise at about 40,000 feet and you get one of two answers. The aerodynamic one: they are pressed up against the coffin corner, where the stall and the speed of sound close in from both sides. The regulatory one: flight level 410 is...
Share this story Look closely at the canopy of a Red Arrows Hawk, a Harrier or a T-6 Texan II and you will see thin, wavy lines running across the transparency like a child’s drawing of lightning. They are not cracks, and they are not heating wires. They are...
Share this story On a moonless night over the desert, the world outside a fighter canopy is black. No horizon, no terrain, no other aircraft, only the glow of the instruments. Then the pilot flips two small tubes down in front of their visor, and the landscape...
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Share this story Watch an F-15 Eagle come in to land and you will see a large panel rise up on its back, just behind the cockpit, like a door opening into the airflow. It is the speed brake, and on the Eagle it is big enough to earn the nickname barn door. It exists...
Share this story Picture a bomber crew in 1942, briefed to hit a Japanese-held island far out along the chain. The target will probably be under cloud. The base they return to may be under fog by then. The wind on the runway could go from calm to hurricane force in...
Share this story Early on the afternoon of 6 October 1973, two Israeli F-4E Phantoms sat on alert at Ofira, the air base at Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai. The sirens went off. The controller did not scramble them. On the radar screens, a formation...
Share this story Watch a B-52 land in a strong crosswind and it looks like something has gone badly wrong. The bomber comes down the approach pointing well off to one side of the runway, touches down still pointing that way, and rolls out with its nose aimed at the...
Share this story A reel doing the rounds on Instagram poses a question that comes up in every aviation comment section sooner or later: why do Russian jets burn blue, not orange like American ones? The claim we are checking. An American jet burning blue: an F/A-18F...
Share this story It was small, slow and oddly shaped, with two rotors that swung through each other like the blades of an eggbeater. Yet the Kaman HH-43 Huskie, better known by its radio callsign “Pedro”, flew more rescue missions in Vietnam than all other...
Share this story “Flying under the radar” is one of the few pieces of aviation slang that means exactly what it says. It is not a metaphor about avoiding attention. It is a statement about geometry, and the geometry is unforgiving in both directions. Ask...
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