Share this story At five in the morning on Thursday, a door shaped like the front of a Boston townhouse swung open beside Gate C25 at Logan. Behind it: 12,000 square feet of wood panelling, copper trim, a replica of Fenway’s Green Monster and a hidden candy...
Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
Share this story Twelve years on, a Boeing 777 with 239 people aboard is still missing. Not missing in the sense that nobody knows exactly where the wreck lies — missing in the sense that the largest and most expensive underwater search in history has now...
Share this story The Bell 47 is the helicopter everyone can draw: a glass bubble, an open lattice tail, two men sitting in what looks like a goldfish bowl on skids. It is the machine in the opening credits of M*A*S*H, and for a generation it was simply what the word...
Share this story At 11:24 on the morning of 14 August 2005, a Greek Air Force F-16 pilot pulled alongside a Boeing 737 orbiting quietly over the Aegean and looked into the cockpit. The first officer was slumped motionless in his seat. The captain’s seat was...
Share this story Twelve minutes after leaving Tokyo on the evening of 12 August 1985, the rear pressure bulkhead of a Boeing 747 gave way. The escaping air blew off most of the vertical stabiliser and severed all four hydraulic systems. The crew were left with an...
Share this story Two minutes and thirty-three seconds passed between the moment an Airbus A310 stopped doing what its crew believed it was doing, and the moment it hit a hillside in the Kuznetsk Alatau. Seventy-five people died. The story is usually told as a simple...
Share this story The next single-aisle airliner has a geometry problem, and Boeing has quietly patented one answer to it. The problem is simple to state. The most promising engine architecture for the 2030s — the open fan — has a rotor roughly twice the...
Share this story For fifty-nine years, one place on earth let you watch Second World War fighters flown at full power, fifty feet off the desert, at more than five hundred miles an hour, around pylons, against each other. Reno ended in 2023. The races themselves did...
Share this story In 1933 Boeing built the aeroplane that made every other airliner in the world obsolete overnight. All-metal, cantilever low wing, retractable undercarriage, autopilot, de-icing boots, a heated and insulated cabin, and 189 miles an hour in cruise. It...
Share this story An Airbus A330 of that weight should touch down at about 135 knots. On 13 April 2010, Cathay Pacific 780 arrived at Hong Kong at 231 knots — with both thrust levers at idle, one engine stuck at seventy percent power, the other stuck below idle,...
Share this story Everybody who knows anything about the Antonov An-2 knows the same thing about it: that the flight manual has no stall speed, and that if the engine quits you simply hold the stick back and the aeroplane parachutes gently to earth at 40 km/h. It is a...
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