Share this story If you want to know what a country is really planning, don’t read the press releases. Look at the parking lots. That’s been the quiet refrain among open-source defence analysts for two years now, as a small army of nerds armed with...
Share this story Beauty in aviation is a real engineering property. The aircraft that pilots, photographers, and aviation historians consistently call the most beautiful are not pretty by accident — they are pretty because every line, every fairing, every panel break...
Share this story Eighty-six years ago today, on the morning of 29 May 1940, Vought-Sikorsky senior test pilot Lyman Bullard Jr. pushed the throttle of an experimental fighter prototype called the XF4U-1, rolled down the runway at Bridgeport Municipal Airport in...
Share this story For nearly fifty years it sat in someone’s storage closet — a small, wooden, surprisingly fragile model of an interstellar starship. This week, the Roddenberry Archive gave the public its first detailed look at the original 33-inch prototype of...
Share this story VietJet Air just dropped a new line on the world’s long-haul map — and it runs straight from Hanoi to Prague. Starting 10 October 2026, the Vietnamese low-cost carrier will fly an Airbus A330 twice a week between Vietnam’s capital and the...
Share this story If you visit the Lockheed SR-71 on display at the Smithsonian, or the Castle Air Museum, or the National Museum of the United States Air Force, you may notice something odd beneath some of the airframes: a faint film of clear, kerosene-smelling...
Share this story The plan was a knockout punch. Tarrant of Byfleet, Surrey — a firm of timber merchants — would build the largest aircraft in the world, fly it from England to Berlin, and bomb the Kaiser into submission. The aircraft would have three wings to spread...
Share this story It looks like a Soviet defector’s nightmare. Four giant ducted fans, each two metres in diameter, mounted on the corners of a stubby fuselage, tilting between horizontal and vertical flight. The whole machine hangs from those four fans like a...
Share this story On the back of an early Boeing 737-200’s Pratt & Whitney JT8D engine, just behind the exhaust plug, are two big curved aluminium-honeycomb panels. In normal flight they wrap around the rear of the engine and look like the back end of the...
Share this story In Ulyanovsk on the Volga, in 1973, a Soviet-Italian film crew built a road. Not a real road for cars. A road-coloured runway, marked up with traffic paint, complete with painted Lada-grey lane lines and roadside signs in Cyrillic, all of it laid down...
Share this story If a fighter pilot ever has to pull the handle between his knees, the next quarter of a second of his life can take as much as two centimetres off his height. Not metaphorically. Not gradually. By the time the canopy clears and the seat is climbing on...
Share this story A .30 calibre bullet hits a fuel tank at 800 metres per second. The aluminium skin punctures. A jet of avgas blows out under pressure, into the slipstream, towards a hot turbocharger exhaust. The aircraft, on most tanks built before 1939, is now...
Recent Comments