FAA Owner-Produced Parts: Making a Legal Part for Your Aircraft
Share this story In August 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration published an Unapproved Parts Notification about cup holders. Not a spar fitting, not a fuel pump — cup holders, headset hangers, windshield shades and yoke grips, 3D-printed in a garage and...
Shock Diamonds Explained: Why Jet and Rocket Exhausts Glow in Rings
Share this story Watch an SR-71 Blackbird leave the runway in full afterburner and the exhaust does something strange. The flame is not a smooth torch. It is a string of bright, evenly spaced beads, glowing knots strung out behind each nozzle like lights on a wire....
Instrument Landing System: How ILS Guides Airliners Through Fog
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...
Pilot Fatigue Survey: Three in Four European Pilots Report Microsleeps
Share this story More than three in four European airline pilots say they have nodded off at the controls at least once in the past month. That is the headline finding of a new report published on 26 October 2026 by the European Cockpit Association (ECA), the...
Electra EL2 Lands at Manhattan Heliport: No Runway Required
Share this story Helicopters own the piers of Lower Manhattan. On Monday morning, 26 October 2026, a small yellow airplane with ordinary fixed wings joined them. Electra flew its hybrid-electric EL2 demonstrator into Downtown Skyport, the heliport on the East River,...
FAA Designees: DER, DAR and Who Really Signs Off an Aircraft
Share this story Ask who certifies a new airliner in the United States and almost everybody answers: the FAA. It is a reasonable answer. For the overwhelming majority of the individual findings that add up to a certification, it is also wrong. The signature on most...
PMA Parts vs OEM Parts: What the FAA Rules Actually Say
Share this story Open the American aircraft certification rules and search them for the word the whole replacement-parts industry argues about. Type OEM into 14 CFR Part 21, the part that governs how every aircraft, engine and component in the United States is...
Surface-to-Air Missile Explained: How a SAM Hunts an Aircraft
Share this story On the morning of 1 May 1960, Francis Gary Powers was nearly four hours into a flight across the Soviet Union, cruising far above the reach of Soviet fighters, when he heard a dull thump. The aircraft lurched forward, there was a bright orange flash,...
Swept Wings Explained: How Sweep Pushed Jets Toward Mach 1
Share this story In the autumn of 1935, some of the greatest aerodynamicists alive gathered in Rome for the Volta Congress, an international meeting on “High Velocities in Aviation”. Ludwig Prandtl was there, and Theodore von Kármán, and G....
Infrared Search and Track (IRST): How Fighters Hunt by Heat
Share this story Every fighter pilot knows the uneasy moment when the radar warning receiver lights up: someone, somewhere, is looking. Now imagine being tracked with no warning at all. No radar emission to detect, no tone in the headset, nothing for a jammer to...
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