Share this story A Tomahawk leaves a destroyer’s deck, climbs, settles down to a few hundred feet and flies for up to 1,600 kilometres (870 miles) at 880 km/h (550 mph). At the end of that, it is expected to arrive at a specific building. Not a city. A...
Share this story The most uncomfortable finding of the whole Ramstein investigation is also the simplest. Nobody broke a rule. The trinational safety commission concluded that the display complied with STANAG 3533, the NATO standard then governing flying displays, and...
Share this story On 23 December 1942 a very large four-engined aeroplane with a glazed nose and twin fins lifted off from Augsburg. It had bunk beds in the fuselage and a galley with hot plates, because the flight it was designed for would take the best part of a day....
Share this story The Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant could carry an 88 mm gun and its tractor, or a medium tank, or two hundred equipped soldiers. Its cargo hold was deliberately sized to match a German railway flatcar, so that anything which could travel by rail could be...
Share this story A submarine on the surface can see about five nautical miles. That is not a technology problem, it is a geometry problem: the lookout’s eyes are roughly five metres above the water and the earth curves away beneath him. The German admiralty...
Share this story The aeroplane was a few months old. It was empty except for the three people flying it, on a short hop across the Mediterranean to collect passengers in Libya. It was a routine positioning flight, the kind that happens a thousand times a morning...
Share this story Three numbers changed on Monday morning, and one name. Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s conference in National Harbor, Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink said the service now intends to have at least 500 Collaborative...
Share this story Every satellite navigation signal that reaches the Earth’s surface arrives weaker than the background noise of the universe. A GPS satellite transmits from 20,000 kilometres up on roughly the power of a car headlight. By the time that signal...
Share this story A reel doing the rounds this week promises that the days of heavy mechanical flaps are numbered, and that flexible composite wings which morph in flight are about to arrive and change everything. Smooth wings that bend instead of hinging, no gaps,...
Share this story A wing optimised for cruising at 500 knots is a bad wing for landing at 140. It is too small, too flat and too efficient. The aeroplane needs a different wing for the last three minutes of the flight, and rather than carry two, it grows one. That is...
Share this story Ask how long a pilot can fly without oxygen and you get two answers that do not resemble each other. The legal answer lives in 14 CFR 91.211, and at 12,000 feet it is remarkably relaxed: fly all day. The physiological answer comes from the FAA’s...
Share this story The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the best German fighter of 1941, and by 1944 it had a problem that no amount of courage could fix. Above roughly six thousand metres it ran out of air. The BMW 801 radial had a single-stage supercharger, and at the altitudes...
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