Share this story The certificate that makes a pilot legally employable arrives at 250 flight hours. The certificate a United States airline is required to hire arrives at 1,500. Between those two numbers sits a gap of 1,250 hours that nobody teaches you, nobody...
Share this story The cart is stowed, the lights are down, and the cabin crew member strapped into the jumpseat a metre from your knees has gone oddly still. Back flat against the seat. Feet together. Hands pushed under the thighs, palms up. Eyes open, looking at...
Share this story On 24 October 1974, a C-5A Galaxy flying over the Pacific let an intercontinental ballistic missile fall out of its cargo hold. The 86,000-pound Minuteman I dropped from 20,000 feet to about 8,000 feet. Then its first-stage motor lit, and a ten-second...
Share this story On 13 January 1920, a New York Times editorial mocked the rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. Once a rocket left the air, the paper argued, it would have nothing to push against, and the professor apparently lacked knowledge taught daily in high schools....
Share this story Walk up to almost any fighter on a museum flight line and look closely at the nose. On a Korean F-4E Phantom, the very tip is jet black. On plenty of other jets the nose cone is a subtly different grey from the fuselage behind it, as if it had been...
Share this story On 15 April 1928, a single-engined monoplane lifted off a scraped-out strip of snow at Point Barrow, Alaska, and pointed its nose across the top of the world. Aboard were the Australian explorer Hubert Wilkins and his pilot, Carl Ben Eielson. Their...
Share this story At around 8.20pm on Friday 30 October 2026, States of Jersey Police took the first call: drones in the restricted airspace over Jersey Airport. The reports kept coming for more than two hours. By the time they stopped, three airliners bound for the...
Share this story The jet that taxied in at Islamabad International Airport on Sunday 1 November 2026 said NORSE in big blue letters down its side. Its passengers, though, had booked with Pakistan International Airlines, and the flight number on the departure boards at...
Share this story You have seen the video. A wing, stripped of its skin panels in places and bristling with instrumentation, is pulled upward by a forest of hydraulic jacks until the tips are somewhere near the roof. A number climbs on a screen. Then there is a bang...
Share this story A P-51 Mustang pulls up off the crowd line at an American air show, rolls inverted at the top of the climb, and the Merlin rearranges something in your chest. Somewhere in that cockpit is a certificate. It is not the certificate a Cessna carries. A...
Share this story It was a Halloween evening, and the temperature outside was nearly 60 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. At 8:34 p.m. local time on 31 October 1956, a twin-engined Navy transport with skis bolted to its wheels bounced across the hard snow of the polar...
Share this story On Thursday 29 October 2026, a De Havilland Canada Dash 8-400 registered VH-84H landed in Rockhampton, Queensland, for the first time, wearing the name of the city it was landing in: Rockhampton. It was the last of 12 second-hand Dash 8-400s that...
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