Share this story It took the internet roughly ten minutes. On 19 May 2026, the National Transportation Safety Board opened its public docket on the crash of UPS Flight 2976 and, among thousands of pages, included a single PDF: a spectrogram, a visual graph of the...
It sounds like the setup for a joke: what happens when a biplane from the 1920s fights jet fighters from the 1950s? The answer, it turns out, is that the biplane wins more often than anyone would like to admit. During the Korean War, North Korean pilots flying...
In September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft in the world took to the skies over southwest England. The Bristol Brabazon was a colossus — its 230-foot wingspan exceeded that of a modern Boeing 747. It was powered by eight radial engines coupled in pairs to drive...
The Boeing 737 has been grounded, investigated, redesigned, and dragged through congressional hearings. Two MAX crashes killed 346 people. A door plug blew out mid-flight. The aircraft’s manufacturer agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge —...
On April 25, 1982, a collection of British helicopters did something that hadn’t been done since World War II: they put a submarine out of action from the air. The target was ARA Santa Fe, an Argentine submarine caught on the surface near South Georgia Island...
On August 17, 1943, the United States Eighth Air Force launched what would become one of the most devastating bombing missions in the history of aerial warfare. The target was Germany’s ball bearing industry — a chokepoint that Allied planners believed could...
On May 10, 1970, an SR-71A Blackbird designated 61-7969 took off from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa on what should have been a routine reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. It would never return. What happened in the skies over Southeast Asia that day remains one of...
Editor’s Update (June 2026): Malaysia’s Cabinet officially cancelled the planned purchase of Kuwait’s retired F/A-18C/D Hornets on 6 February 2026. The background analysis below on Malaysia’s fighter gap and the strategic rationale for the deal...
Share this story On the evening of 4 March 1957, a US Navy patrol blimp lifted off the apron at Naval Air Station South Weymouth, Massachusetts, and pointed itself east, towards the Atlantic Ocean. Its envelope was 343 feet long. Its registration was Bureau Number...
Share this story Somewhere outside the Siberian town of Abakan, in the Republic of Khakassia, there is a packed-snow airstrip about 200 metres long. It is the only way to get into a village called Nizhny Kurlugash in the winter months. The strip is serviced, twice a...
Share this story On 23 February 2004, the Acting Secretary of the Army — a former Senate staffer and Vietnam veteran named Les Brownlee — stood at a Pentagon podium with the Army Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker, and announced the cancellation of...
Share this story On the morning of 4 December 1958, two men climbed into a slightly modified, four-seat Cessna 172 at McCarran Field on the southern edge of Las Vegas. The airplane was painted in the cream-and-script livery of the Hacienda Hotel, a Strip resort that...
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