Share this story A landplane accelerates down a smooth runway. A floatplane has to fight its way out of the water first, and water does not want to let go. The roar, the spray, the moment the nose drops and the aircraft suddenly skims like a speedboat: that is a...
Share this story Airline seat maps quote a number most passengers never think about until their knees meet the seat in front: seat pitch. It is the closest thing the industry has to a measure of how much room you get, and it is also widely misunderstood. Pitch is not...
Share this story Everyone who flies knows the scene. Your group is called, you shuffle down the jet bridge, and then you stop. Somewhere ahead, someone is wrestling a roll-aboard into an overhead bin, and forty people wait behind them in a single-file aisle. Boarding...
Share this story In the early 1920s, the first aeroplane most Americans ever saw up close landed in a farmer's pasture. A young man in a leather helmet climbed out of a battered biplane, offered rides for a few dollars, and if the crowd was big enough, someone walked...
Share this story In 1960 and 1961, thirteen American women pilots went through the same punishing medical tests used to pick the Mercury Seven astronauts. They swallowed rubber tubes, had ice water poured into their ears and pedalled weighted bicycles to exhaustion....
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 On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story On the afternoon of 22 September 1980, Iraqi jets swept across the border and bombed Iranian air bases, including Tehran's Mehrabad airport. The aim was to destroy Iran's air force on the ground. It did not work. Iranian hardened shelters absorbed...
Share this story In November 1953 the French army dropped thousands of paratroopers into a remote valley in northwest Vietnam, repaired an old Japanese-built airstrip and dared the Viet Minh to attack. Dien Bien Phu was meant to be an airhead: a fortress that lived...
Share this story Jet fighters had shot each other down before 1951, but never like this. Over the Yalu River in northwest Korea, a stretch of sky the Americans called MiG Alley, swept-wing jets met swept-wing jets for the first time in a sustained campaign. The North...
Share this story The Bay of Pigs is remembered as a landing that failed on the beach. It was lost in the air. Over five days in April 1961, a handful of Cuban pilots in old British piston fighters and American-built jet trainers beat a CIA air force, sank the ships...
Share this story A little before one o'clock in the morning on 6 September 2007, a single word came over the radio in an Israeli Air Force command post: "Arizona". It meant that a building in the desert of eastern Syria, a building the Israelis called "the Cube", no...
Share this story An American safety rule does not normally apply to a French or Dutch airline. Put a Delta flight number on the ticket, though, and it does. That is the lesson Air France and KLM have just paid $425,000 to learn, after the US Department of...
Share this story France has had a gap in its electronic ears since 2022, and a business jet with an unusual bulge under its nose is about to close it. The first Dassault Falcon 8X Archange, the French Air and Space Force's new strategic signals-intelligence aircraft,...
Share this story The F-47 has not flown yet, but the US Air Force already knows where it wants to prove the jet is ready for war, and how much it is willing to spend on the buildings. A presolicitation notice posted in late October lays out an "F-47 Future Campus" at...
Share this story For the first time in 44 years, a brand-new fighter type wears the maple leaf. On 22 October 2026 the Royal Canadian Air Force took delivery of its first two CF-35A Lightning IIs at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, and announced the news on social media...
Share this story There are two numbers no airline pilot wants to say on the radio in the same breath: one landing gear leg that will not come down, and minutes of fuel left. On Sunday evening, 25 October, the crew of United Airlines flight 1854 dealt with both over...