In April 1966 the Royal Canadian Navy sent its only aircraft carrier into a shipyard at Lauzon, Quebec, for a mid-life refit. The point of a mid-life refit is the clue: you spend the money because the ship has another life to run. She came out sixteen to eighteen...
Not one airliner was touched. Ukraine still took all four Moscow airports off line, delayed 400 flights and sent 30 aircraft to Kazan, Samara and St Petersburg.
Modern fighters make their own oxygen, and military standards forbid them from delivering it pure below 15,000 feet. The reason took a grounded F-22 fleet, a paused Navy trainer fleet and a decade of investigation to establish.
A primary circuit failed at Philadelphia TRACON. The backup fibre had already been cut by a digger in New Jersey. Newark did not take an arrival for eight hours.
A Boeing 757 sits on the Antarctic ice at Union Glacier. So why is the Arctic threaded with airline routes while the south stays empty? The answer is a compass that stops working, fuel that can freeze, and a runway nobody is entitled to use.
Target lists approved, bombs going onto the aircraft, the first wave close to launching. Then Trump called the whole thing off.
The flight deck of a destroyer escort is roughly the size of a tennis court. In a North Atlantic winter it does not hold still. It rolls through thirty degrees, pitches through eight, and rises and falls a distance best measured in storeys. Now put a...
A hundred nautical miles north of Dutch Harbor is not anywhere. It is grey water, weather that arrives sideways, and the shortest line between the Aleutians and the Russian Far East. This week it has an American and Canadian task force in it, and Alaska-based fighters...
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 built in 1992 and...
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 CT-157 Siskin II....
Captain Daniel Arsenault was running a morning charter out of Pensacola on Saturday when he spotted something floating offshore. He went over for a look, the way you do. Underneath it was a good-size mahi-mahi, which went straight into a cooler already full of fish....
Kapotnya sits nine miles from the Kremlin. It is not a military district. It is chimneys and pipework and a wall of apartment blocks pressed right up against the fence, and on the night of 19 September it was lit from below by its own fires. By Sunday morning the...
The last A-10 ever built flew the last Weapons School sortie on 18 August. Four months earlier the Air Force extended the Warthog to 2030 – after closing its depot, its pilot school and its engine line.
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 the Aleutians,...
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 that in any other...
On 6 November 1943 a German fighter pilot logged thirteen victories in seventeen minutes. Erich Rudorffer flew more than 1,000 missions, was shot down sixteen times, and died in 2016 at 98 — and his totals are a case study in what wartime claim records are and are not.
A carrier deck is 300 metres long and a loaded fighter needs a kilometre. The world settled on two answers: throw the aeroplane, or tilt the end of the runway. How CATOBAR, STOBAR and STOVL really differ.