Seventeen minutes after leaving Honolulu on 24 February 1989, the forward cargo door of a United Airlines 747 burst open and tore a hole in the cabin. Nine passengers were lost. The crew brought the crippled jet back, and a grieving family helped prove what had really gone wrong.
A Florida-based fleet of F-104 Starfighters is preparing to carry a rocket under its wing. In December, Starfighters Space plans the first captive-carry flight of its Starlaunch 1 development vehicle between Kennedy Space Center and Cecil Spaceport.
Share this story Six blue-and-gold jets get the screams. But before any of them roll down the runway, somebody has to haul the spare parts, the tool chests and about 40 people to the show. For more than half a century, that somebody has been a big, blue,...
Share this story The first attempt failed. On the second, a homemade monoplane built from sawmill scrap and cotton rolled down a slope in Athens, Georgia, lifted 40 to 50 feet into the air, flew about 100 yards and crashed, losing both wings. The local editor T. W....
Share this story At 17:43 on Saturday, 17 October 2026, two F-16s of the Romanian Air Force roared off the runway at the 86th Air Base at Borcea. Radar had picked up a group of targets about 120 kilometres east of Snake Island, heading south-west. Twenty-two minutes...
Share this story On 15 March 1975, a hang glider pilot stood on the frozen surface of a Wisconsin lake with a biplane glider on his shoulders and a small two-stroke engine buzzing behind him. There was no hill and no sea breeze to lift him. He opened the throttle,...
Share this story On Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026, families waved from Portsmouth's Round Tower as HMS Prince of Wales slipped out to sea for the second phase of Operation Firecrest. She sails to take charge of the UK Carrier Strike Group in the North Atlantic and...
Share this story Positive rate of climb. Gear up. The pilot moves the lever, the hydraulics whine, and a few seconds later the wheels should be tucked away behind closed doors. Then a warning appears instead, or a gear leg simply stays where it is, hanging in the...
Share this story Picture a moonless night in the North Sea. Somewhere below, an enemy battle squadron is steaming hard, blacked out. Above it, at little more than 40 knots, a strange four-engined monoplane drifts along at 1,500 feet, its crew peering into the dark and...
Share this story The boarding music is still playing when it drifts down the aisle: a stale, cheesy, slightly chemical smell. Crews have a name for it. They call it “dirty socks”, sometimes “wet dog”. Most passengers wrinkle their noses and...
Share this story A flying boat that sank U-boats off Iceland. A homebuilt biplane that took one Washington State couple more than a decade. A powered hang glider that lifted off a frozen Wisconsin lake in 1975 and started a movement. They now share a roof in Oshkosh....
Share this story Some fans set alarms for 3:30 a.m. Others crawled through three hours of traffic and then parked on the roadside, hoping the tow trucks had the weekend off. By just after 1 p.m. on Saturday, Naval Air Station Jacksonville announced it was full. The...
Share this story Seven months ago it was the front-runner. In March, Rheinmetall and Boeing signed up to bring the MQ-28 Ghost Bat to Germany; in June, it was shown at ILA Berlin with a bigger wing and new German partners. This week Berlin quietly took it off the...
Share this story Two weeks ago the number was three. On Thursday evening in Brussels, over a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the EU summit, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever more than tripled it. Belgium, he said, will hand Ukraine ten F-16 fighters before...
Share this story Boeing rolled its longest 737 out of the Renton factory in November 2019. Nearly seven years later, the jet still lacks the one thing it needs to carry a paying passenger: an FAA type certificate. That wait may now be measured in days. On Friday, 16...
Share this story The camera is mounted on a small fixed-wing drone, and it is chasing a helicopter. A camouflaged Russian Mi-28NM fills more of the frame with every second as the drone closes from behind and slightly above, lined up on the engine bay. Then the video...
Share this story Sixteen thousand feet above the North Sea, 32 nautical miles north-north-east of Cromer, an RAF Voyager tanker was passing fuel to a Typhoon on 18 February 2026. Then something black and circular flashed towards the windscreen and passed 100 to 150...