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 In December 2025 a photographer in the California desert filmed two black diamonds coming through a low-level route at a few hundred feet. In 2026 another one caught them again. The aircraft were F-117 Nighthawks, and the United States Air Force...
Share this story A sixty-six-year-old captain walks out to an Air New Zealand jet in Auckland, flies a domestic sector, and goes home. Entirely legal. Put the same captain on a service to Los Angeles and the flight cannot depart. There is no single retirement age for...
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
Share this story In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been...
Share this story In November 1947 the French naval air arm wrote a specification for a carrier aircraft that could do two things. It had to loiter for four hours at low level hunting submarines, and it had to be able to dash at 700 km/h. Those are not two...
Share this story Every pilot who has ever pulled a handle has done the same thing: left the aeroplane behind and taken his chances alone in the air, at whatever speed and altitude the emergency happened to occur. In 1949 a Soviet design bureau drew a fighter that...
Share this story A modern airliner cruising at 38,000 feet is, from the point of view of a surface-to-air missile battery, a large, slow, predictable radar return. Everything that keeps it safe is procedural: the crew knows where not to fly, and the people with the...
Comparte esta historia Frank Kendall, quien se desempeñó como Secretario de la Fuerza Aérea de los Estados Unidos desde julio de 2021 hasta enero de 2025, pasó tres días a principios de septiembre de 2026 defendiendo el mismo argumento en tres lugares: un artículo de opinión en The New York Times el 1 de septiembre, una entrevista en...
Comparte esta historia. Cuando Amy Johnson despegó de Croydon el 5 de mayo de 1930 con destino a Australia, llevaba diez meses con su licencia de piloto y nunca había volado más allá del trayecto de Londres a Hull. Su avión era un de Havilland Gipsy Moth de segunda mano con cabina abierta...
Comparte esta historia El 2 de junio de 1944, bombarderos B-17 de la Decimoquinta Fuerza Aérea bombardearon estaciones de clasificación ferroviaria en Hungría y luego continuaron hacia el este. Aterrizaron en Ucrania, en tres aeródromos soviéticos que el Ejército Rojo había entregado a los estadounidenses. Fue la primera vez en la guerra que un...
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