Share this story For six years, China’s reusable spaceplane has been one of spaceflight’s best-kept secrets. It launches on a rocket, stays in orbit for months, releases small objects, lands on a runway in the desert, and Beijing says almost nothing about...
Share this story A landplane accelerates down a smooth runway. A floatplane has to fight its way out of the water first, and water does not want to let go. The roar, the spray, the moment the nose drops and the aircraft suddenly skims like a speedboat: that is a...
Share this story In the early 1920s, the first aeroplane most Americans ever saw up close landed in a farmer’s pasture. A young man in a leather helmet climbed out of a battered biplane, offered rides for a few dollars, and if the crowd was big enough, someone...
Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story Jet fighters had shot each other down before 1951, but never like this. Over the Yalu River in northwest Korea, a stretch of sky the Americans called MiG Alley, swept-wing jets met swept-wing jets for the first time in a sustained campaign. The North...
Share this story There are two numbers no airline pilot wants to say on the radio in the same breath: one landing gear leg that will not come down, and minutes of fuel left. On Sunday evening, 25 October, the crew of United Airlines flight 1854 dealt with both over...
Share this story The US Air Force has a tanker problem, and a Washington think tank has just put a price on fixing it. In a report released on 27 October, the Hudson Institute argues that the Air Force should stop buying the KC-46A Pegasus sooner than planned and...
Share this story The A-10 Thunderbolt II was built to find tanks, not boaters. But in late April 2026, two Warthogs training over central Florida turned their night vision goggles and targeting pods on Lake Arbuckle and helped deputies find a 73-year-old man who had...
Share this story In August 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration published an Unapproved Parts Notification about cup holders. Not a spar fitting, not a fuel pump — cup holders, headset hangers, windshield shades and yoke grips, 3D-printed in a garage and...
Share this story Watch an SR-71 Blackbird leave the runway in full afterburner and the exhaust does something strange. The flame is not a smooth torch. It is a string of bright, evenly spaced beads, glowing knots strung out behind each nozzle like lights on a wire....
Share this story Picture it: two four-engine transports dropping out of the Patagonian night onto an Argentine runway, roughly 2,000 feet apart. Their ramps come down while the propellers are still turning, and dozens of SAS soldiers pour out to find and destroy a...
Share this story For more than three hours on Monday afternoon, a Royal Air Force A400M Atlas drew slow, ever-wider circles in the sky over Warminster. The four-engine transport had taken off from MOD Boscombe Down near Amesbury just before 2pm on 26 October 2026, and...
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