Share this story In the summer of 1986 the largest aircraft in the world sat on a ramp at Lakehurst, New Jersey, three quarters of a mile from where the Hindenburg had burned. It was 343 feet long. It was a Navy blimp with four helicopters bolted underneath it. On 1...
Share this story The most important document in this story is a memo. It was written on 27 June 1972 by an engineer named Dan Applegate, it ran to a few pages, and it said clearly what was going to happen. Twenty months later it happened. Three hundred and forty-six...
Share this story Somebody put four foam cushions on a heating vent. That is where it starts. Not with a missile, not with a Soviet fighter, not with a catastrophic structural failure. Three cloth-covered cushions stowed on a hot-air outlet under a seat before...
Share this story Two flag carriers that have been quietly cooperating since the early 1960s signed a new agreement in Seoul on 3 September. On its own that would barely register. The timing is what makes it interesting. In fourteen weeks, Asiana Airlines ceases to...
Share this story A short clip posted to Instagram this week shows something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: a jet-powered combat aircraft, no cockpit, no pilot, settling onto a desert runway on its own. The aircraft is Anduril’s YFQ-44A Fury. The...
Share this story On or around 31 August 2026, over an Egyptian air base, a Chinese tanker extended its hose and refuelled a French-built Rafale. The Egyptian military spokesman released the image; Chinese accounts amplified it within hours. It is, as far as anyone can...
Share this story It is the question we get asked more than any other, and it is the one question about fighter aircraft that has no honest single answer. The problem is not that nobody knows. The problem is that “best” is four or five different questions...
Share this story Every flying boat is a compromise between two incompatible shapes. To get off the water you want a deep hull, to keep the propellers clear of spray, and a wing sitting at a high angle so it will unstick. To fly efficiently you want neither of those...
Share this story The Pacific is the largest single feature on the planet. In 1928 nobody had flown across it, and the reason was arithmetic: the distances between usable landfalls were longer than any aircraft could reliably manage, and if you missed the island you...
Share this story In 1926 an oilfield roughneck in Oklahoma took a metal splinter in his left eye and lost it. Seven years later, the same man flew around the world on his own in under eight days, and then went looking for the edge of the atmosphere. Wiley Post had one...
Share this story No aircraft has ever looked faster standing still. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was sixty-seven feet of needle, with a nose you could have used to open letters and wings so small they looked like an afterthought. Everything about it promised Mach 2. It...
Share this story On 4 September 2026, an Air China Airbus A330-200 is scheduled to lift off from Beijing, stop for three hours in Bucharest, and continue to Zagreb. When it lands, Croatia will have a scheduled year-round air link to mainland China for the first time....
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