Share this story On 30 October 1963 the crew of USS Forrestal watched a four-engined transport with a 132-foot wingspan come down their deck. It had no tailhook. It had no catapult attachment. The ship’s island cleared its wingtip by about fifteen feet. It...
Share this story Milan’s Malpensa Airport now officially carries the name of Silvio Berlusconi. At a ceremony in the arrivals area of Terminal 1 on Friday 25 September, the former prime minister’s family and senior government figures unveiled the new name,...
Share this story Nobody likes reaching for it, but everyone expects it to be there. From 1 October, airBaltic passengers will no longer find a sick bag in the seat pocket in front of them. The Latvian airline, now restructuring under US Chapter 11 bankruptcy...
Share this story Qatar Airways has quietly ended an era. The Doha carrier has retired its Airbus A330 passenger fleet, Reuters reported on 25 September, and it is sending some of the pilots who flew them to Rwanda. The move is a direct consequence of the Iran war. Jet...
Share this story GPS jamming is usually a story from the Baltic, the Black Sea or the Middle East. In the early hours of Friday 25 September, it was a story from Los Angeles. Crews on at least two United Airlines flights told air traffic controllers that GPS...
Share this story Airbus has a date. On Tuesday 29 September at 10:20 local time, weather and systems permitting, the first A350F freighter will take off from Toulouse for the first time. Airbus will stream the flight live on X. The aircraft, MSN700, registered F-WXLD,...
Share this story Sicily’s busiest airport has shut again. On Saturday 26 September, ash from Mount Etna’s North-East Crater forced Catania-Fontanarossa Airport to stop all flights, first until the afternoon and then until noon on Sunday 27 September. A...
Share this story For more than forty years, a Cessna Citation that legally needed two pilots could be flown by one, as long as the pilot held the right exemption and endorsement. That ends on 29 September. The FAA has announced that it will stop issuing single-pilot...
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 Type “do air traffic controllers make 300k” into Google and you will get a wall of confident yes. It is one of those numbers that circulates because it sounds plausible and nobody checks the source. The source, as it turns out, says...
Share this story An airliner crossing Kansas at Mach 0.85 is doing nothing remarkable. The same aeroplane at Mach 1.01 would be breaking federal law. The line is not about safety, or engineering, or fuel. It is about a noise, and about an American town in 1964 that...
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...
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