Swiss crews meet GPS spoofing every day. Switzerland is nonetheless switching its airports away from the ground-based landing system that spoofing cannot touch, and doing it to save money. That plan has just started to unravel. The Tages-Anzeiger reported today that...
In March 2026, Israel said it had destroyed Iran’s F-14 Tomcat fleet at Isfahan. Three months later Iranian state television showed a Tomcat coming home from a mission. Six months later, social media is still confidently announcing that the last Tomcats on earth...
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...
In August 2026 the US Air Force posted a contracting notice so dull that almost nobody read it. It concerned cartridge- and propellant-actuated devices for the F-117 Nighthawk — an aircraft officially retired in 2008. The internet noticed the obvious part, which...
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...
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...
In 1968, for two months, Eastern Air Lines flew fare-paying passengers between cities in the north-eastern United States in a French military transport with four propellers all driven by the same shaft. The following year American Airlines tried the same aircraft, and...
The Royal Navy’s first jet fighter had a tail wheel. Two of them, in fact, tucked under the rear fuselage, so that the aircraft sat on the deck nose-high like a Spitfire. Every jet you can picture has a nosewheel, for the obvious reason that a jet pointing at...
In 1971 a Swiss fighter jet landed on a motorway. Not in an emergency — on purpose, as part of a doctrine that assumed Swiss airfields would be cratered within hours of a war starting, and that the air force would therefore have to operate from public roads. The...
Britain came out of the Second World War with a captured German idea it did not fully understand. The delta wing promised high speed and a strong, light structure, and the Germans had been drawing them for years. Nobody in Britain knew what one actually felt like to...
At the 1981 Paris Air Show a small orange-and-white aircraft took off vertically like a helicopter, rotated its engines forward, flew past the crowd like an aeroplane, rotated them back, and stopped in mid-air to bow. The New York Times, not a publication given to...
In April 1980 a very ill old man was wheeled into a room at Northrop and shown a model of an aircraft. He had spent his career insisting that the ideal aeroplane was a wing and nothing else — no fuselage, no tail, no drag it did not need — and the industry...
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