Share this story Luxembourg’s Findel Airport has now been closed by drones twice inside a week, and nobody knows who is flying them. The first closure, on Friday evening 18 September, diverted nineteen inbound flights and stranded more than 1,800 passengers. The...
Share this story Broughton’s West Factory was built in 2003 to make the biggest wings anyone had ever attempted: 83,500 square metres of floor under one roof, put there so that North Wales could build the wings of the Airbus A380. When the superjumbo programme...
Share this story The Dome Fire had been burning in Yosemite National Park for five days. On Sunday afternoon a Eurocopter AS332L1 Super Puma was working it the way heavy helicopters do: dipping a bucket, climbing out, running in low over the trees, releasing, turning...
Share this story Sanctions usually work slowly. You cannot buy this aircraft, you cannot get that part, and a fleet quietly ages into uselessness over twenty years. What the US Treasury Secretary described on Monday is something faster and blunter. “On September...
Share this story Thirteen days. That is how long British aviation got between one national air traffic control failure and the next. Early on Monday morning a connectivity fault hit the NATS centre at Prestwick, the facility that runs Scottish upper airspace and feeds...
Share this story Ask most people what a fighter pilot breathes and the answer comes back instantly: pure oxygen. It is one of those facts everyone knows, it was broadly true for about forty years, and today it is wrong in two separate directions. Modern fighters...
Share this story At about ten o’clock on Monday morning, the Federal Aviation Administration stopped Newark Liberty, Teterboro and Philadelphia International. At one in the afternoon it added John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia. Between roughly 09:40 and just after...
Share this story There is a Boeing 757 parked on the Antarctic ice at 79 degrees south. It is white, it has rows of passenger windows, and it got there under its own power on a runway of polished blue ice at Union Glacier, roughly 1,000 kilometres from the South Pole....
Share this story On the departures board at Minsk National Airport, flight ATS6446 from Tehran was listed under a carrier name that told you nothing at all: Private owners. It appeared once. Nobody has said who was on it. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas MD-87...
Share this story At Gatineau on Thursday morning a single turboprop pulled up over the airport in a ceremonial flypast, and a sixty-year era began its long goodbye. The aircraft was a Pilatus PC-21, built at Stans in central Switzerland. In Canadian service it is the...
Share this story Open a flight tracker halfway through a Los Angeles to Tokyo flight and the aircraft is somewhere it has no business being. Not out in the middle of the blue, where the straight line on the screen says it should be, but up near the top of the map, off...
Share this story The panel above your head snaps open and four yellow cups drop on clear plastic tubes. Somewhere in the cabin a bag rustles. Within a minute or two, passengers start to notice a smell — hot metal, a hint of something scorched, the sort of smell...
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