Share this story The Turbulent weighs about as much as two adult passengers. It is built from wood and fabric, powered by a converted Volkswagen Beetle engine, and its own display team has cheerfully described it as little more than a flying motorbike. On Sunday...
Share this story Cheap drones have humbled expensive air defenses for years now. The Pentagon’s answer keeps coming back to the same idea: a weapon that fires light, costs pennies a shot, and never runs out of magazine. This week a senior Defense Department...
Share this story In the California desert this month, U.S. Marines rehearsed an attack under fire from an unlikely enemy: a Soviet gunship built to kill NATO troops. The Mi-24 Hind was not captured, and it was not a mock-up. It was the real thing, flying for the other...
Share this story There is a patch of sky over interior Alaska so large it could swallow a small country. This month, American and Australian fighter crews are fighting a war inside it. Red Flag-Alaska 26-3 began on 13 August and runs through 28 August 2026, a Pacific...
Share this story It was the eve of the Obon holiday, when families across Japan travel home to honour their ancestors. Japan Airlines Flight 123 lifted off from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 18:12 on 12 August 1985, bound for Osaka. The aircraft was a Boeing 747SR,...
Share this story It was meant to be one of the shortest, dullest legs in the timetable. At 19:52 on 8 January 1989, British Midland Flight 92 climbed away from London Heathrow bound for Belfast, a Boeing 737-400 with 118 passengers and eight crew aboard. The aircraft...
Share this story Here is a fact that sounds invented: to bail out of the Douglas XB-42 Mixmaster, you first had to blow your own propellers off. The two blades spinning behind the tail would have shredded anyone who jumped, so Douglas wired the tailcone with...
Share this story Picture the Philippine Sea at mid-morning on 19 June 1944. The water is glassy, the horizon hazed with heat, and 25,000 feet up a Grumman Hellcat pilot is watching a stain spread across the sky to the west. It is not weather. It is aircraft —...
Share this story For the crowd gathered at Old Warden on the evening of 15 August, it was meant to be the gentlest of spectacles: vintage aeroplanes flying to a live orchestra as the light softened, the Shuttleworth Collection’s famous “Flying...
Share this story By 1931 the rest of the world was building sleek metal monoplanes. Imperial Airways bought a fabric-covered biplane with four engines, a fixed undercarriage and a cruising speed of about 100 mph, and flew it for nine years without killing anybody. The...
Share this story Some aircraft look powerful. A few look beautiful. The Scaled Composites Proteus looks impossible, a spindly, insect-like machine of twin booms, stalky tandem wings and a slender pod, apparently held together by optimism. It seems far too fragile to...
Share this story Seventy-four years ago today, on 16 August 1952, a large and beautiful British airliner lifted off from Filton for the first time. Passengers who later flew in it swore it was the smoothest, quietest airliner they had ever experienced, so hushed that...
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