The Flying Barrel That Predicted the Jet Engine

The Flying Barrel That Predicted the Jet Engine

It looks like someone strapped wings and two open cockpits onto a beer keg and pushed it off a hill. Short, fat and hollow, the Stipa-Caproni is routinely voted one of the ugliest aircraft ever to actually fly. And yet this 1932 Italian oddity quietly sketched out an...
Japan’s Kaga Is a Carrier Again

Japan’s Kaga Is a Carrier Again

A grey warship longer than three football fields is steaming through the Pacific, and stealth fighters are dropping onto its deck. For most navies that would be unremarkable. For Japan, it is something close to historic — because for eighty years, Japan insisted it...
El primer hombre salvado por un paracaídas

El primer hombre salvado por un paracaídas

The sky over Dayton was the washed-out blue of a late October afternoon when Lieutenant Harold R. Harris felt his control stick begin to hammer in his hand. He was a mile and a half above the rooftops, throwing his stubby Loening monoplane through a mock dogfight,...
Montreal Just Got a Whole New Airport

Montreal Just Got a Whole New Airport

At 7 a.m. on 15 June 2026, a Porter Airlines Embraer E195-E2 rolled toward the runway at a South Shore airfield that had not seen a scheduled airline departure in living memory. As flight PD181 lined up for Vancouver, the airport fire trucks arched a water-cannon...
China’s Cargo Drone Just Flew Itself

China’s Cargo Drone Just Flew Itself

On a grey morning in Pucheng, in China’s Shaanxi province, a chunky white-and-blue aircraft with two propellers and a twin-boom tail rolled down the runway, lifted off, and flew a full 22-minute circuit — climb, manoeuvre, approach and landing. Nothing...