Share this story Two aeroplanes sit on the same ramp. Same type, same year, same engine, same avionics. One belongs to a doctor who flies it to see his grandchildren. The other belongs to a flight school and has a hundred hours put on it every eleven weeks by people...
Share this story A hydraulic actuator is cut out of a DC-10 that will never fly again. Eighteen months later the same actuator is bolted into an airliner carrying three hundred people, and everything about that is legal. The thing that makes it legal is a single sheet...
Share this story Concorde never floated gently onto a runway. It arrived nose-high, droop nose lowered so the pilots could see over it, touching down at around 170 mph at a far steeper angle of attack than any conventional airliner would use. Above that pale triangle,...
Share this story The doors are shut, the seatbelt sign is on, and the terminal starts to slide away from the window. Yet the engines are silent. A machine built to cross oceans is being shoved backwards by a squat tractor barely taller than a car, while a ground...
Share this story At dawn on 5 July 1943, before the first German tank rolled forward, large formations of Soviet bombers, Shturmoviks and fighters headed for the Luftwaffe airfields around Kharkov and Belgorod. The plan was simple: catch the German air fleet on the...
Share this story Concorde’s Rolls-Royce/Snecma Olympus 593 engines were turbojets, and like every jet engine their compressors needed subsonic air. At Mach 2 cruise, the air reaching the front of each nacelle was travelling at about 1,350 mph. The job of slowing...
Share this story Russia’s jet-powered Geran-4 drones were built to outrun the cheap defences that tamed the propeller Shahed. On Monday 27 October, Ukraine’s General Staff published a number that suggests the gap is starting to close: over the past three...
Share this story A cheap drone is a hard thing to stop. It is small, slow and low, which makes it difficult to see on radar, and it is so inexpensive that firing a conventional air defence missile at it is a losing trade. Since 2022 the war in Ukraine has turned that...
Share this story In August 1929, most people had never been in an aeroplane, and nobody had flown around the world in anything as comfortable as a hotel. Then a silver airship 236 metres long drifted over Tokyo, then over the Pacific, then over Los Angeles, with a...
Share this story The fog is so thick that the crew of an airliner on final approach cannot see the ground, let alone the runway. Yet the jet is tracking a line through the murk with an accuracy measured in metres, descending along an invisible slope towards a...
Share this story A Turkish F-16 has released a 2,000 lb bomb that flew itself to its target on a pair of pop-out wings. On 26 October 2026, ASELSAN announced that its KGK-84 winged guidance kit had completed its first qualification range firing from an F-16 at the...
Share this story Three and a half years ago, the US Air Force told Congress it would not buy the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon. On 26 October 2026 it announced that it had done exactly that. The Department of the Air Force has handed Lockheed Martin a...
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