Share this story On 10 February 1906, King Edward VII smashed a bottle against the bow of a new battleship at Portsmouth. A year after work on her began, HMS Dreadnought went to sea for trials, and every other battleship in the world, including all of Britain’s...
Share this story On paper, the X-57 Maxwell was one of the most exciting aircraft NASA had drawn in decades: a small, all-electric airplane with fourteen propellers strung along a skinny wing, promising to cruise five times more efficiently than the twin it was based...
Share this story Every fighter you have ever seen has a tail. Fins keep it pointing forward, rudders turn it, and for a stealth aircraft those same fins are big flat radar reflectors. In 1997, NASA and McDonnell Douglas flew a small, sinister-looking jet over the...
Share this story It had no wings worth the name, no engine running at touchdown and only one chance to get it right. On 5 August 1975, NASA test pilot John Manke brought the X-24B lifting body down from 60,000 feet without power and landed it on the concrete main...
Share this story On 12 December 1953, Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1A to Mach 2.44, faster than any human had flown. Seconds later the rocket plane went completely out of control. It rolled, yawed and tumbled end over end, slamming Yeager’s helmet into the...
Share this story If you take your first flying lesson in America a couple of years from now, there is a growing chance it will be in an Italian two-seater with a carbon-fibre fuselage. Tecnam announced on 5 October 2026 that it is bringing its P2008JC NG trainer to...
Share this story Russia’s newest attack drones are fast enough to outrun most of the interceptor drones Ukraine sends up against them. On Monday, 5 October 2026, the Ukrainian Air Force said it had found an answer that does not need to fly at all: automated...
Share this story About half an hour after leaving Heathrow on Monday, 5 October 2026, British Airways flight BA295 to Chicago was cruising at around 36,000 feet over the Irish Sea when the oxygen masks dropped. Minutes later the Boeing 777 was at 9,000 feet, squawking...
Share this story In September 1969, three Lockheed engineers put their names to a report with a dry title: A Study of Very Large Nuclear-Powered Aircraft in a Potential Mission Application. Inside was one of the largest flying machines ever drawn. Its wings would have...
Share this story Ask an American air traffic controller whether they work a forty-hour week and you will get a straight answer: yes. Five shifts, eight hours each, exactly as the contract says.Then ask when those forty hours happen. The common answer is that all five...
Share this story Most people have heard of blacking out in a fighter jet. Pull hard, the G builds, blood drains from the head, the world goes grey and then dark. But there is an evil twin that gets far less attention, and pilots respect it just as much. Push the stick...
Share this story On 24 September 1929, Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle climbed into the rear cockpit of a biplane at Mitchel Field on Long Island, and somebody pulled a canvas hood over his head. From that moment he could see nothing outside. He could see only a handful of...
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