Share this story Picture a bomber crew in 1942, briefed to hit a Japanese-held island far out along the chain. The target will probably be under cloud. The base they return to may be under fog by then. The wind on the runway could go from calm to hurricane force in...
Share this story Early on the afternoon of 6 October 1973, two Israeli F-4E Phantoms sat on alert at Ofira, the air base at Sharm el-Sheikh on the southern tip of the Sinai. The sirens went off. The controller did not scramble them. On the radar screens, a formation...
Share this story Watch a B-52 land in a strong crosswind and it looks like something has gone badly wrong. The bomber comes down the approach pointing well off to one side of the runway, touches down still pointing that way, and rolls out with its nose aimed at the...
Share this story A reel doing the rounds on Instagram poses a question that comes up in every aviation comment section sooner or later: why do Russian jets burn blue, not orange like American ones? The claim we are checking. An American jet burning blue: an F/A-18F...
Share this story It was small, slow and oddly shaped, with two rotors that swung through each other like the blades of an eggbeater. Yet the Kaman HH-43 Huskie, better known by its radio callsign “Pedro”, flew more rescue missions in Vietnam than all other...
Share this story “Flying under the radar” is one of the few pieces of aviation slang that means exactly what it says. It is not a metaphor about avoiding attention. It is a statement about geometry, and the geometry is unforgiving in both directions. Ask...
Share this story In the first nine months of 2026, Ukrainian military units ordered more than 590,000 drones through a single online marketplace. The number alone is remarkable. What they chose to buy is more telling: the most ordered category is no longer the FPV...
Share this story Somewhere on every long-haul flight there is a passenger explaining to a neighbour that the trip is about the same as a chest X-ray. It is one of aviation’s most durable pieces of received wisdom, and it turns out to be roughly right for...
Share this story NATO has run a lot of joint procurement competitions. Almost all of them ended with every country buying something different anyway. Exactly one produced an aircraft that three air forces actually flew, in numbers, for decades. It was small, it was...
Share this story There is a simple test for how badly an aircraft designer has run out of room. Look at where the instruments ended up. On the Henschel Hs 129, some of the engine gauges were bolted to the inside faces of the engine nacelles, out in the slipstream,...
Share this story Two Airbus A380s are sitting on the Airbus books with Guernsey registrations, both bought back from Malaysia Airlines, both identical when they rolled out of Toulouse. One of them is about to carry the most radical jet engine anyone has proposed in...
Share this story Somewhere in the second tier of Airbus’s supply chain, a coating was applied too thinly. Not on a wing spar, not on an engine mount — on stringers, the unglamorous aluminium stiffeners that run the length of a fuselage and hold its skin in...
Recent Comments