Share this story The certified maximum capacity of a Boeing 747-200 in the densest airline layout ever offered was somewhere around 550 seats. On 24 May 1991, an El Al 747 freighter left Addis Ababa carrying, by the Guinness World Records figure, 1,088 people. Two of...
Share this story About six kilometres from McMurdo Station, under a shifting crust of snow on the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a Lockheed Super Constellation. It has been there since 8 October 1970. Nobody died in the accident that put it there, nobody ever came to take...
Share this story On 23 December 1942 a very large four-engined aeroplane with a glazed nose and twin fins lifted off from Augsburg. It had bunk beds in the fuselage and a galley with hot plates, because the flight it was designed for would take the best part of a day....
Share this story For two years, between 1956 and 1958, exactly one jet airliner was carrying fare-paying passengers anywhere in the world. The Comets were grounded. The 707 had not arrived. The Caravelle was not in service. The aircraft holding that title was a Soviet...
Share this story The Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant could carry an 88 mm gun and its tractor, or a medium tank, or two hundred equipped soldiers. Its cargo hold was deliberately sized to match a German railway flatcar, so that anything which could travel by rail could be...
Share this story On the morning of 21 August 1976, B-52s flew in from Guam with Phantom escorts. F-111s crossed the Pacific from Idaho. Fighters launched from Kadena, Clark, Osan and Taegu. South Korean F-5s and Sabres joined the stack. An aircraft carrier task force...
Share this story A submarine on the surface can see about five nautical miles. That is not a technology problem, it is a geometry problem: the lookout’s eyes are roughly five metres above the water and the earth curves away beneath him. The German admiralty...
Share this story The United States Air Force has been trying to graduate 1,500 pilots a year for the better part of a decade. It has repeatedly said the number out loud, repeatedly built plans around it, and repeatedly missed it. On Sunday, Air Education and Training...
Share this story In October 2025, three F-15 Eagles took off from Barnes Air National Guard Base in Westfield, Massachusetts, and did not come back. That was the end of eighteen years of Eagle operations by the 104th Fighter Wing. One of the pilots in that final...
Share this story Most of the autonomy on display at National Harbor this week was fighter-shaped. Stealthy wings, missile bays, names like Vengeance and Fury. Textron brought a box. Specifically, it brought the Cessna SkyCourier UX: a certified, in-service, thoroughly...
Share this story At half past four on the afternoon of 5 March 1944, a photographic officer landed at Lalaghat in Assam with a three-foot-square print under his arm and ninety minutes to spare. Captain Charles Russhon had flown over Burma that morning in a B-25...
Share this story Ask an aviation enthusiast about Kampfgeschwader 200 and you will probably hear a version of the same story: that the Luftwaffe flew captured B-17 Flying Fortresses in American markings, slid them into USAAF bomber streams, and shot the formations...
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