Share this story The Royal Canadian Navy bought the Grumman Tracker for one reason above all others: it was short enough to fit on HMCS Bonaventure. Then de Havilland Canada built ninety-nine of them at Downsview, the only Canadian-built aircraft the RCN ever ordered....
Share this story HMS Nabob was a Royal Navy escort carrier with a Royal Canadian Navy crew, and on 22 August 1944 a German torpedo opened her starboard side below the waterline, dropped her stern fifteen feet, killed twenty-one of her men and left her dead in the...
Share this story Luxembourg’s Findel Airport has now been closed by drones twice inside a week, and nobody knows who is flying them. The first closure, on Friday evening 18 September, diverted nineteen inbound flights and stranded more than 1,800 passengers. The...
Share this story At a quarter to midnight on Monday, Vilnius International Airport stopped accepting arrivals. The cause was not weather, not a technical fault, and not a drone. It was balloons. Lithuanian authorities detected what the airport described as...
Share this story Broughton’s West Factory was built in 2003 to make the biggest wings anyone had ever attempted: 83,500 square metres of floor under one roof, put there so that North Wales could build the wings of the Airbus A380. When the superjumbo programme...
Share this story The Dome Fire had been burning in Yosemite National Park for five days. On Sunday afternoon a Eurocopter AS332L1 Super Puma was working it the way heavy helicopters do: dipping a bucket, climbing out, running in low over the trees, releasing, turning...
Share this story Photographs circulating from Iran this week show a scatter of scorched composite panels, burnt wiring and a small turbojet, laid out on bare ground. Iranian sources say it was shot down. What it is, is more interesting than how it got there. The parts...
Share this story Sanctions usually work slowly. You cannot buy this aircraft, you cannot get that part, and a fleet quietly ages into uselessness over twenty years. What the US Treasury Secretary described on Monday is something faster and blunter. “On September...
Share this story For most of sixty years, the most famous helipad in the world was a metal disc laid on grass. Marine pilots bringing the president home to the White House aimed for it, set down on the South Lawn turf, and departed again. It worked because the...
Share this story Three aircraft, one photograph. On the left, an F-15E Strike Eagle in Nellis test markings, tail code OT. In the middle, an F-35A. On the right, something with no cockpit, no canopy, no pilot: a General Atomics FQ-42 Vengeance, sitting in formation as...
Share this story Thirteen days. That is how long British aviation got between one national air traffic control failure and the next. Early on Monday morning a connectivity fault hit the NATS centre at Prestwick, the facility that runs Scottish upper airspace and feeds...
Share this story The McDonnell F2H-3 Banshee was the only jet fighter the Royal Canadian Navy ever flew from a carrier deck, and Canada very nearly did not get it. The navy asked for sixty new aircraft. It received thirty-nine used ones, handed down from the United...
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