Share this story A propeller-driven drone took off from a test centre in Tekirdag on Friday, flew out over the Black Sea, and put a ballistic missile through a ship more than 250 kilometres away. Then it turned round and flew home along its planned route. That is not...
Share this story On the morning of 11 September 2001, four pilots of the District of Columbia Air National Guard ran to their F-16s at Andrews without waiting for live weapons to be loaded. One of them, Lt. Heather Penney, had never scrambled an aircraft before. She...
Share this story Shortly before Christmas 2024, a document arrived at the Swiss Federal Department of Defence (VBS) from Washington. It was a non-paper — the diplomatic instrument governments use to float a position without formally committing to it. Its message...
Share this story On 12 June 2025, an Air India Boeing 787-8 came down within a minute of leaving Ahmedabad. Of the 242 people on board, one walked away: Vishwash Kumar Ramesh, a 40-year-old British national, who had been sitting in seat 11A. People on the ground were...
Share this story A controller is working a busy approach frequency. Four aircraft are talking over one another about runway changes and speed restrictions. Then one voice comes through, flat and unhurried, and says a single word three times. Everyone else stops...
Share this story Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax...
Share this story On the morning of 15 February 1961 a Sabena Boeing 707 came out of a clear sky over Belgium, circled Brussels airport three times while its crew fought it, and fell into a field at Berg, less than two miles short of the runway. Seventy-two people on...
Share this story Ninety-three young American soldiers, three South Vietnamese servicemen and eleven civilian crew boarded a Super Constellation at Travis Air Force Base in March 1962 and flew west. Somewhere between Guam and the Philippines, the aeroplane stopped...
Share this story On 10 March 1956 a six-engined American bomber descended through a solid deck of cloud over the Mediterranean to meet a tanker. It never arrived. No wreckage was found. No bodies were found. And neither were the two containers of nuclear weapon...
Share this story At 10:31 Greenwich time on 8 April 1950, a United States Navy Privateer lifted off from Wiesbaden and turned for the Baltic. Ten men were aboard. None of them came back, and no trace of any of them has ever been found. The aircraft was called...
Share this story Five years after the Taliban walked into Kabul, one of the odder questions in military aviation is still unanswered: what is actually left of the air force the United States spent two decades and billions of dollars building? The honest answer is that...
Share this story Korean Air will switch on free Starlink Wi-Fi on 15 September 2026, and in doing so becomes the first full-service airline in East Asia to put SpaceX’s low-Earth-orbit network into its cabins. It starts small: four aircraft. It is meant to...
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