No flypast, no speeches. Marines pulled the wings off BuNo 166288, put it on a flatbed and drove the last Harrier built for the Corps to Pensacola.
Rafale F5: France Orders the First Contracts After FCAS Died
With the Franco-German fighter programme gone, the DGA has funded the four riskiest pieces of the Rafale F5: a new radar, a digital jammer, a stealthy datalink and a bigger engine.
Dude 44 Bravo: The F-15E Backseater Breaks His Silence on Iran
The weapons systems officer shot down over Iran in April has spoken for the first time, on 60 Minutes. Fifty hours, a broken back and a parachute wrecked before he needed it.
RAF Fairford: A Business Jet Landed at the Bomber Base by Mistake
A Cessna Citation Excel aiming for Cotswold Airport landed at the USAF bomber base eleven miles east instead, and spent three hours explaining itself.
Switzerland Is Scrapping ILS as GPS Spoofing Hits Crews Daily
Swiss crews meet GPS spoofing daily, yet Switzerland is replacing ground-based ILS with satellite approaches to save money. After an EASA recommendation, the removal at Bern has been suspended.
Battle Damage Assessment: Why the First Number Is Always Wrong
Israel said Iran’s F-14 fleet was destroyed. Then one flew. From the Butt Report to the Scud hunt to Kosovo’s 120 tanks that became 14, counting what an air strike destroyed has been getting people wrong for eighty-five years.
Fighter Jet Takeoff and Landing: The Real Numbers, F-104 to F-35
A Lockheed F-104 Starfighter came down final approach at 175 knots with full flaps, and that was the basic number. The pilot then added five knots for every 1,000 pounds of fuel still in the tanks above the first thousand. On a typical recovery that put the approach...
CAD/PADs: Every Fighter Jet’s Explosives Have an Expiry Date
A dull contracting notice for the retired F-117 exposed something every combat aircraft shares: dozens of small explosive charges with expiry dates. When those dates go wrong, fleets stop flying.
How Much Runway Does a 747 Need? 737, 777 and A380 Compared
Type the question into a search engine and you get a number. A 747 needs 10,000 feet. Or 3,000 metres. Or 8,000 feet. The numbers disagree with each other, none of them cite anything, and all of them are answering a question that does not really exist. There is no...
FAR 91.117: Why Airliners Slow to 250 Knots Below 10,000 Feet
Sit at the front of a descending airliner and you can feel the moment. The nose comes up a fraction, the engines spool, and a low rumble rises through the floor as the speedbrakes bite. The aeroplane has just arrived at 10,000 feet with too much energy, and it is now...
Breguet 941: The STOL Airliner Eastern Actually Flew
Four propellers on one shaft, a wing blown from tip to tip, and two months of Eastern Air Lines passenger service. Five were built.
Supermarine Attacker: The Navy Jet With a Tail Wheel
The Fleet Air Arm’s first jet fighter sat nose-high on twin tailwheels, because its wing came from a propeller fighter. It lasted three years.
De Havilland Venom: Switzerland Flew It Until 1983
Britain built it as a stopgap and dropped it in 1962. Switzerland licence-built it, fitted 1970s fire control, landed it on motorways, and flew it for another twenty-one years.
Boulton Paul P.111: Britain’s Yellow Peril Delta
Britain had a captured German idea and no idea what it felt like to fly. So it built a broad-bodied jet with swappable wingtips and controls nobody could tame.
Bell XV-15: The Tiltrotor That Bowed to the Crowd
Two aircraft solved a problem that had defeated designers for forty years, stole the 1981 Paris Air Show, and made every tiltrotor since possible.
Northrop N-9M: The Flying Wing That Led to the B-2
Jack Northrop spent fifty years insisting a wing needed nothing else. A 60-foot wooden aeroplane proved him right, broke down on nearly every flight, and killed two pilots seventy-six years apart.
SWISS A350: The Third Jet Lands, Seven Still to Come
HB-IFC reportedly reached Zurich on 12 September. Each A350 that arrives retires a piece of the four-engined aeroplane that defined Swiss long-haul flying.