Wheels Up at Amberley: The Day an RAAF F-111 Landed on Its Belly
Share this story Shortly after takeoff from RAAF Base Amberley on 18 July 2006, the crew of an Australian F-111 heard something no F-111 crew in Australia had heard in thirty years. The control tower was on the radio: their left main wheel had just fallen off. What...
Lockheed Offers 48 India-Built C-130Js in $10.5 Billion Bid
Share this story India wants 60 new military transport aircraft, and it wants most of them made in India. Lockheed Martin has now said exactly how it would do that: build a dozen C-130J Super Hercules in Georgia, and the other 48 in India with Tata. The offer, set out...
F-4 Phantom Without a Gun: Why It Went to Vietnam Missile-Only
Share this story In early October 2026, Ukrainian outlets including Militarnyi relayed a claim that a Ukrainian Air Force Mirage 2000-5F had shot down a Russian cruise missile with its 30mm DEFA cannon rather than a missile. The claim first appeared on the X account...
Two-Person Cockpit Rule Explained: Germanwings, EASA and What Changed
Share this story For about two years after March 2015, if you flew with almost any European airline and one of the pilots stepped out to use the lavatory, a flight attendant stepped in. They did not touch the controls. They simply stood or sat in the cockpit until the...
El Al Flight 1862: The 747 That Lost Two Engines Over Amsterdam
Share this story Thirty-four years ago tonight, a little after half past six, a Boeing 747 freighter fell out of the sky over Amsterdam and into a block of flats. El Al Flight 1862 had taken off from Schiphol just over thirteen minutes earlier. Both engines on its...
London City and Key West: What Fits on a 5,000-Foot Runway
Share this story Key West International sits three feet above the Atlantic. Its single runway, 09/27, is 5,076 feet long and 100 feet wide, and there is an engineered arrestor bed at each end because there is nowhere else for an aeroplane to go. Airliners land there...
Air Serbia A320 Clipped by easyJet Sharklet at Paris CDG
Share this story The Air Serbia jet was doing everything right. It had landed at Paris Charles de Gaulle on the evening of Friday, 2 October 2026, and was standing still on the apron, waiting for instructions from air traffic control. Then an easyJet Airbus taxied...
IAF Chief A.P. Singh: India Needs 36 to 40 New Fighters a Year
Share this story Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh did not use his farewell press conference to celebrate. With four weeks left before he retires, the head of the Indian Air Force sat down in New Delhi on 3 October 2026 and laid out, in unusually plain words, how far his...
The Only Shuttle That Landed at White Sands: Columbia, STS-3 and the Gypsum That Never Left
Share this story At 9:04 in the morning on 30 March 1982, Space Shuttle Columbia came out of a clear desert sky over southern New Mexico and settled onto a runway made of gypsum. Around it, for miles, there was nothing but more of the same. It was the end of STS-3,...
Bolter: What Happens When a Carrier Jet Misses Every Wire
Share this story A carrier landing is the only landing in aviation where the pilot pushes the throttles forward at the moment of touchdown. The jet slams onto the deck, the tailhook drags across the steel, and the engines are already screaming at full power. If the...
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