A Boeing 757 sits on the Antarctic ice at Union Glacier. So why is the Arctic threaded with airline routes while the south stays empty? The answer is a compass that stops working, fuel that can freeze, and a runway nobody is entitled to use.
Houthi Strikes Called Off: Bombs Were Already on the Jets
Target lists approved, bombs going onto the aircraft, the first wave close to launching. Then Trump called the whole thing off.
Beartrap: The Canadian Invention That Put Sea Kings on Destroyers
The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
Operation Tundra Merlin: An Arctic Kill Chain Off Dutch Harbor
A hundred nautical miles north of Dutch Harbor is not anywhere. It is grey water, weather that arrives sideways, and the shortest line between the Aleutians and the Russian Far East. This week it has an American and Canadian task force in it, and Alaska-based fighters...
Tehran to Minsk: The VIP MD-87 Route That Lasted Four Flights
On the departures board at Minsk National Airport, flight ATS6446 from Tehran was listed under a carrier name that told you nothing at all: Private owners. It appeared once. Nobody has said who was on it. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-87 built in 1992 and...
CT-157 Siskin II: Canada Swaps Snowbird Jets for a Turboprop
At Gatineau on Thursday morning a single turboprop pulled up over the airport in a ceremonial flypast, and a sixty-year era began its long goodbye. The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-21, built at Stans in central Switzerland. In Canadian service it is the CT-157 Siskin II....
Eglin Lost an FLM-136. A Florida Fishing Boat Caught It.
Captain Daniel Arsenault was running a morning charter out of Pensacola on Saturday when he spotted something floating offshore. He went over for a look, the way you do. Underneath it was a good-size mahi-mahi, which went straight into a cooler already full of fish....
Pelican Ballistic Missile Debuts in Ukraine’s Moscow Strike
Kapotnya sits nine miles from the Kremlin. It is not a military district. It is chimneys and pipework and a wall of apartment blocks pressed right up against the fence, and on the night of 19 September it was lit from below by its own fires. By Sunday morning the...
A-10 Weapons School Closes While the Warthog Flies to 2030
The last A-10 ever built flew the last Weapons School sortie on 18 August. Four months earlier the Air Force extended the Warthog to 2030 – after closing its depot, its pilot school and its engine line.
Great Circle Routes: Why Pacific Flights Curve North Past Alaska
Open a flight tracker halfway through a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight and the aircraft is somewhere it has no business being. Not out in the middle of the blue, where the straight line on the screen says it should be, but up near the top of the map, off the Aleutians,...
Airplane Oxygen Masks: How Long They Last and Why They Get Hot
The panel above your head snaps open and four yellow cups drop on clear plastic tubes. Somewhere in the cabin a bag rustles. Within a minute or two, passengers start to notice a smell — hot metal, a hint of something scorched, the sort of smell that in any other...
Thirteen Claims in Seventeen Minutes: The Arithmetic of Erich Rudorffer
On 6 November 1943 a German fighter pilot logged thirteen victories in seventeen minutes. Erich Rudorffer flew more than 1,000 missions, was shot down sixteen times, and died in 2016 at 98 — and his totals are a case study in what wartime claim records are and are not.
Ski-Jump or Catapult: The Two Ways to Get a Jet Off a Ship
A carrier deck is 300 metres long and a loaded fighter needs a kilometre. The world settled on two answers: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the runway. How CATOBAR, STOBAR and STOVL really differ.
Radar Warning Receivers: How a Fighter Knows It Is Being Hunted
Every radar looking for you has to shout to do it. How the radar warning receiver listens, sorts the noise into individual threats, and why it was invented over North Vietnam in 1965.
Helmet-Mounted Displays: How Fighter Pilots Aim By Looking
The helmet-mounted display let fighter pilots stop pointing the aeroplane at the target. From South African Mirages and the MiG-29 to JHMCS and the F-35 that flies with no HUD at all.
HOTAS: Why Fighter Pilots Never Let Go of the Controls
A fighter pilot in a turning fight is pulling seven or eight times his own body weight. His vision is narrowing. He is breathing against a system designed to stop him blacking out. And he needs to change his radar mode, select a different missile, and put out chaff....
V-1 Flying Bomb: The RAF Trick of Tipping It With a Wingtip
The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate in your face. So a...