Share this story Here is a strange way to predict a North Korean missile test. Open a flight-tracking website, and watch for a single, ageing American jet to take off from Nebraska, cross the Pacific, and start flying long racetrack patterns over the Yellow Sea. When...
Share this story Stand at any airport window and count the aircraft. Almost all of them are white, with a tail and a bit of branding to tell them apart. Airlines spend fortunes on brand identity, and then paint their single most visible asset the same colour as...
Share this story In 2009, Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska closed a runway, sent out crews, and repainted the enormous white numbers at both ends. Runway 1L–19R became runway 2L–20R.Nothing had been built. Nothing had moved. The concrete was in...
Share this story Next time you get a window seat, look at the bottom of the window. There is a hole in it. A real one, drilled straight through, about the size of a pinhead.Most people who notice it assume one of two things: that it is damage, or that it is there to...
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 —...
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