Share this story It is just before dawn on 17 April 1944, and a sleek, triple-tailed airliner is rolling down the runway at Lockheed’s Burbank field. In the left seat, hands on the controls, sits one of the most famous men in America: Howard Hughes —...
Share this story It is 7 March 1964, and the desert south of Cairo shimmers in the morning heat. On the runway at Helwan sits a tiny, needle-nosed delta-wing jet, barely bigger than a sports car with wings. An Egyptian test pilot runs the engine up, releases the...
Share this story From this December, a British holidaymaker will be able to board a Boeing 787 at London Gatwick and step off it on a beach in southern Thailand — no change of plane, no Gulf stopover. Norse Atlantic Airways has announced a new nonstop service...
Share this story United Airlines just turned a Boeing 787-10 into a flying flag. On 15 June 2026, the carrier rolled out a bold “Stars and Stripes” special livery — a deep blue fuselage, fifty white stars, and diagonal red-and-white stripes sweeping...
Share this story When you buy a front-line fighter, you also have to solve a quieter problem: how to train the pilots who will fly it. On 16 June 2026, Canada took a major step toward an answer — and the jet it chose is Italian. On the sidelines of the G7 summit...
Share this story High over the Mediterranean on 1 June 2026, a French Rafale pushed past the speed of sound and let a missile go. The moment of separation — missile leaving the rail of a jet travelling faster than sound — is one of the most violent things...
Share this story For the first time ever, you can fly from Alaska to New England without stopping. On 13 June 2026, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 lifted off from Ted Stevens Anchorage International and pointed its nose almost due east, bound for Boston — roughly...
Share this story Two of the rarest sights in modern air combat shared the same patch of Arkansas sky on 16 June 2026: an F-22 Raptor and an F-35 painted in the markings of the Finnish Air Force, flying wingtip to wingtip. One was built to own the sky; the other to see...
Share this story Over the flat plains of Çorlu in north-western Turkey this spring, a jet trainer and a tailless black drone flew in tight formation. Nothing unusual in that — except that no one was flying the drone. The pilot doing the commanding sat in the other...
Share this story For decades, “fighter jet” meant a human strapped into a cockpit. On 17 June 2026, the U.S. Air Force quietly ended that monopoly. It signed production contracts for two jet-powered combat aircraft that have no cockpit, no ejection seat,...
Share this story It looks like someone strapped wings and two open cockpits onto a beer keg and pushed it off a hill. Short, fat and hollow, the Stipa-Caproni is routinely voted one of the ugliest aircraft ever to actually fly. And yet this 1932 Italian oddity quietly...
Share this story Some aircraft look wrong. The Blohm & Voss BV 141 looks impossible. The crew sits in a glazed pod on one side; the engine and the entire tail are on the other, joined by a stub of wing. It is as if someone took half of two different aeroplanes...
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