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...
Share this story Before there was a Channel Tunnel, and before roll-on, roll-off ferries could swallow a hundred cars at a time, there was a stranger, more glamorous way to take your car to France: you drove it into the nose of an aeroplane. The aircraft that did the...
Share this story For 41 years, the record for the fastest subsonic airliner crossing of the Atlantic belonged not to a Boeing or a Douglas, but to a graceful British jet with four engines bunched at its tail. The Vickers VC10 did London to New York in 5 hours and 1...
Share this story Imagine boarding a transatlantic flight, settling into your seat, and then, somewhere over the ocean, walking down a spiral staircase to a cocktail lounge for a drink and a hand of cards. That was not a fantasy in 1950. That was a Tuesday aboard the...
Share this story In the mid-1980s, Beechcraft decided to leap a generation ahead of everyone else. It teamed up with Burt Rutan, the most imaginative aircraft designer alive, and built a business aeroplane that looked like it had flown in from the next century: an...
Share this story On the afternoon of 1 November 2011, a Boeing 767 slid down a runway at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport on its belly, spraying sparks and foam, with 231 people aboard and not a single wheel beneath it. When it stopped, everyone walked away. Some...
Share this story Long before the Tomahawk, and years before Polaris let a submarine fire a nuclear missile from beneath the waves, America’s first seagoing deterrent worked in the most nerve-wracking way imaginable. To shoot, the submarine had to surface in...
Share this story Nine little red jets, wingtips almost touching, trailing white smoke across a summer sky. For generations of Canadians that image is the air show. After the 2026 season, it changes forever: the Snowbirds are retiring the CT-114 Tutor, the tiny jet...
Share this story Jakarta’s traffic is the stuff of legend — the kind of gridlock where a five-mile trip can eat two hours. Now an Indonesian operator wants to fly over it. On August 12, Whitesky Aviation signed a memorandum of understanding for 60 electric air taxis,...
Share this story In the last winter of World War II, Allied airmen flying night missions over Europe began to see something they could not explain. Glowing balls of light, orange and red, would appear beside their aircraft and pace them through the dark, matching...
Share this story For forty years, aviation enthusiasts have chased a ghost. It has a name, a rumored shape, and a trail of strange evidence. What it does not have is a single confirmed photograph, a serial number, or an admission that it was ever built. The ghost is...
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