Type “what does squawk 7700 mean” into a search box and you get a correct answer in five seconds. Type “what does squawk 2303 mean” and you get a page of confident nonsense. That asymmetry is the most interesting thing about transponder codes....
A wing optimised for cruising at 500 knots is a bad wing for landing at 140. It is too small, too flat and too efficient. The aeroplane needs a different wing for the last three minutes of the flight, and rather than carry two, it grows one. That is what flaps and...
There is one sentence that, properly understood, prevents a large fraction of fatal loss-of-control accidents. The US Federal Aviation Administration puts it like this: “It is possible to exceed the critical AOA at any airspeed, at any attitude, and at any power...
Almost everyone who has been told how a wing works has been told something wrong. The explanation goes like this: the top of the wing is curved and the bottom is flat, so air going over the top has further to travel, so it must go faster to meet up with the air...
Ask how long a pilot can fly without oxygen and you get two answers that do not resemble each other. The legal answer lives in 14 CFR 91.211, and at 12,000 feet it is remarkably relaxed: fly all day. The physiological answer comes from the FAA’s own aeromedical...
In February 1943 a German evaluation commission arrived at the Italian flight test centre at Guidonia with an Fw 190A-5 and a Bf 109G-4, and spent several weeks flying them against three new Italian fighters. The head of the commission, Oberst Petersen, telegraphed...
Khe Sanh Combat Base sat on a plateau in northwest Quảng Trị province, eleven kilometres from Laos, at the end of a road that had been cut by ambush since August 1967. Whatever the six thousand men there needed had to arrive by air. From 21 January 1968 they needed a...
The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the best German fighter of 1941, and by 1944 it had a problem that no amount of courage could fix. Above roughly six thousand metres it ran out of air. The BMW 801 radial had a single-stage supercharger, and at the altitudes where American...
In August 1941 a civil servant named David Bensusan-Butt was given 633 night photographs taken by RAF bombers over occupied Europe and asked a simple question: are they hitting anything? His answer broke Bomber Command. Of the aircraft whose crews reported attacking...
There is a category of military aircraft that never fires a shot and decides the battle anyway. The Beriev A-50 is one of them: an Ilyushin Il-76 transport with a nine-metre radar dish bolted on top, fifteen people inside, and the ability to see six hundred kilometres...
A Russian jet-powered drone struck the engine of a train at Yahodyn on Monday morning, about two kilometres from the Polish border. Nobody was killed. The passengers had been ordered off fifteen minutes earlier, which is now a routine Ukrainian railway procedure and...
The de Havilland Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and, after three of them came apart in the air, the most notorious. Its reputation never recovered. But the last two unfinished Comet 4C fuselages on the Hawker Siddeley line did not go to scrap. They became...
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