On 5 January 2024 a door plug departed an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 MAX at around 16,000 feet, leaving a hole in the side of a full airliner. Nobody was killed, which was luck rather than design. The Federal Aviation Administration eventually proposed a fine....
The Royal Air Force has a motto that was chosen in 1912, long before anyone had a serious plan for getting there: per ardua ad astra, through adversity to the stars. On 1 September 2026 the RAF quietly took the astra part literally. Air Command, the headquarters of...
The Fighter Collection at Duxford flies aeroplanes that most museums would bolt to a plinth. Late last month one of the rarest of them had an engine problem on a maintenance check flight and ended up on its belly in a field northwest of Royston. The pilot was not...
Four fighters is not an air force. Four fighters, three tankers, two airlifters and three hundred people who can put all of that down on a foreign runway and have it flying again the next morning — that is an air force, compressed. On 8 September the French Air...
Almost every retired airliner ends the same way. It sits in a desert or a Turkish boneyard, the engines come off, the useful parts are stripped, and what is left goes through a shredder. TC-JDL got a second life instead. The Airbus A340-311 was cut up, loaded onto...
Claims about strikes deep inside Russia are cheap. Verification is not. This week the satellites caught up with two of them, and the pictures are unusually specific about what Ukrainian drones actually hit. At Millerovo air base in Rostov Oblast, imagery published by...
The Airbus A320 has three hydraulic systems, and they are separate on purpose. Green, blue and yellow. Three reservoirs, three pressure sources, no fluid shared between them. The architecture exists so that no single failure can take away the flight controls. On 4...
Two Iranian ballistic missiles came off the rail on Saturday morning and went for a United States aircraft carrier and a guided-missile destroyer. Both missed. Nobody aboard either ship was hurt. The answer arrived within hours, and it was not aimed at a radar site or...
The display had been running for barely two minutes. Thousands of people were standing along the fence line at Tanagra Air Base, north of Athens, cameras up, waiting for the noise that only a Phantom makes. Then the jet came out of a turn, low, and did not climb. At...
At about half past three on Friday afternoon, a Russian drone came down on a grey neoclassical block at 33 Volodymyrska Street in central Kyiv, directly across the road from St Sophia Cathedral. The building is the headquarters of the Security Service of Ukraine, the...
Switzerland ordered its Patriot air defence system in 2022 and expected the first fire unit to arrive in 2026. It is now 4 September 2026, nothing has arrived, and the workaround that was supposed to rescue the timetable has just fallen apart. Armasuisse has confirmed...
In November 1955 the British government cancelled a four-engined jet transport that was around 80 percent built, on the grounds that nobody in Britain wanted it. Eleven months later the same government approved the purchase of fifteen Boeing 707s for its state...
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