To certify the A380’s Trent 900, Rolls-Royce fired an explosive charge at the root of a fan blade with the engine at full speed and watched the case hold. Here is what a blade-off test is, what the rules demand, and why the famous QF32 failure was a different problem.
For decades the most recognisable jet on a US Navy flight line was a gloss black test aircraft with a white Playboy bunny on its tail. Here is the real story of VX-4’s Vandy 1, from the F-4 Phantom to the last Tomcat ever built.
The UK will fit RAF Chinook helicopters and A400M Atlas airlifters with firefighting equipment to tackle wildfires on remote moorland and hillsides.
Before he stepped onto the Moon, Neil Armstrong had ejected over Korea, saved a spacecraft spinning once a second, and ejected again from a lunar training vehicle seconds before it crashed. Here are his four closest calls, checked against NASA and the record.
The left wing gear of Cargolux 747-8F LX-VCF collapsed at its stand in Luxembourg. The airline has ordered checks on its whole 747-8F fleet.
Tom Skerritt, Top Gun’s Commander Mike “Viper” Metcalf, has died at 93. Before Hollywood he served four years in the US Air Force.
General Atomics has picked Boeing-owned Spirit Defense in Wichita as fuselage design-build partner for the FQ-42 Vengeance CCA drone.
For the first time, RAF Typhoons escorted French nuclear-armed Rafales in a simulated strike, under Exercise RUMMY.
Share this story On 24 October 1958, a slim silver delta with tricolour roundels pushed past Mach 2 in level flight, reaching Mach 2.2. No Western European aircraft had done it before. Nine years later, the same design would win one of the most decisive air campaigns...
Share this story You have just finished your drink, the seat backs are coming up and suddenly the cabin goes dark. No, the airline is not trying to set a romantic mood or save electricity. When crews dim the cabin lights for takeoff and landing, they are preparing...
Share this story In the summer of 1940, Chinese pilots over Chongqing met a new Japanese fighter that seemed to break the rules. It flew farther than a fighter should, turned tighter than anything they had, and carried cannon.Warnings from China, including from the...
Share this story On 14 September 1939, two weeks after war broke out in Europe, a 50-year-old engineer in a business suit and a felt hat climbed into an open frame of steel tubes in Stratford, Connecticut. Ropes tied the machine to the ground. When Igor Sikorsky...
Share this story Just after midnight on 5 December 1971, a company of about 120 Indian soldiers at a lonely border post in the Thar Desert heard engines in the dark. Coming towards them was a Pakistani armoured column: dozens of tanks, infantry in trucks, an entire...
Share this story Fly from New York to London overnight and you land at breakfast time feeling as if someone has stolen a night of your life. Fly back and you arrive tired, but somehow it is easier to shake off. That is not your imagination, and it is not just the...
Share this story A heat-seeking missile chases something it can feel: the hot exhaust of an engine. A radar-guided missile chases something it cannot see at all until a radar wave bounces off it. That difference is why radar missiles can kill from beyond visual range,...
Share this story In the mid-1930s, C.R. Smith, the president of American Airlines, picked up the telephone and would not put it down. On the other end was Donald Douglas, who had a perfectly good airliner, the DC-2, and no particular wish to build another. Smith...
Share this story The most successful pilot ever to fly the F-14 Tomcat never went to TOPGUN, never landed on a carrier and never fought for the U.S. Navy. He flew for Iran, against Iraq, in a war most Western readers barely remember.Jalil Zandi is credited with 11...