Stratospheric Spies: Balloons, Solar Gliders and Pseudo-Satellites
Share this story Between the top of the weather and the bottom of space lies a band of sky that almost nobody uses. The stratosphere, roughly 18 to 30 kilometres up for the purposes of this story, is too high for airliners and most fighters, far below satellites, and...
Singapore Airlines Flight 006: Take-Off From a Closed Runway
Share this story Shortly after 11pm on 31 October 2000, a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747-400 lined up for take-off at Taipei in driving typhoon rain. The crew had been cleared to depart from runway 05L. They were on the wrong runway. The aircraft, flight SQ006 to Los...
Richard Heyser’s U-2 Flight That Started the Cuban Missile Crisis
Share this story At dawn on Sunday, 14 October 1962, a single grey reconnaissance jet crossed the Yucatán Channel at 72,500 feet and turned north towards western Cuba. Its pilot was Major Richard S. Heyser of the US Air Force. He was flying so high that he left no...
United 767 Engine Shutdown: UA946 Diverts to St. John’s
Share this story Four hours out of Washington, somewhere over the dark North Atlantic, the crew of United Airlines flight UA946 got the message no twin-jet pilot wants: a problem with one of their two engines. They declared an emergency, turned the Boeing 767 around,...
The 1-in-60 Rule and the 3-to-1 Descent: Pilot Mental Math
Share this story At 300 knots you are covering a nautical mile every twelve seconds. That is the governing constraint on every calculation a pilot does in the air: not whether an answer is exactly right, but whether it arrives before the situation it described has...
Henschel Hs 117 Schmetterling: Not the First SAM, but the Closest to Service
Share this story By 1943 Allied bomber streams were pounding German cities by day and night, and the Luftwaffe’s fighters and flak could not stop them. One answer was a weapon that did not yet exist anywhere: a guided missile fired from the ground at aircraft....
China’s Anti-Stealth Radars: Detection Is Not a Firing Solution
Share this story Every two years at Zhuhai, China parks a row of radar trucks on the apron and lets the world photograph them. The placards promise a great deal. Metre-wave arrays that see what microwave radars cannot. Passive sets that never transmit....
Faster Than Any Fighter? The Lockheed Orion at the Swiss Museum of Transport
Share this story In the aviation hall of the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne hangs a bright red low-wing monoplane with white stripes and Swissair titles. The placard beneath it is headed “Faster than any Fighter-Plane”. It is the Lockheed Orion, the...
FAA Special Airports: How Captains Qualify for Aspen and Telluride
Share this story Telluride Regional sits on a mesa in south-west Colorado at 9,069.7 feet, which makes it the highest commercial-service airport in the United States by a wide margin. The runway is 7,111 feet long and ends, at both ends, in air. The FAA’s own...
Saba, Lukla and Courchevel: The World’s Shortest Runways
Share this story De Havilland Canada publishes a short-field take-off figure for the Twin Otter: 366 metres. The declared take-off run available on runway 12 at Saba is 349 metres. Runway 30 gives you 355. The scheduled aeroplane that serves the island needs more...
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