Share this story Germany builds a great deal of aircraft structure. Fuselage sections, wings, cabins and engines leave German factories every day. What it has not done for a very long time is design, certify, assemble and support a complete airliner of its own. On 29...
Share this story A Russian Tu-95MS strategic bomber crashed during a training flight in the Amur region of Russia’s Far East on Monday 29 September 2026. Six of the seven crew members were killed and one was injured and taken to hospital, Russia’s Ministry...
Share this story Ninety-seven years ago this week, on the afternoon of 30 September 1929, a German car heir strapped himself into a pod under a glider wing, alongside sixteen gunpowder rockets, lit them and shot into the sky over Frankfurt. Fritz von Opel stayed up...
Share this story Many air forces share the same problem. It spends years and a small fortune turning a young officer into a military pilot, and then an airline offers that pilot a better salary and a calmer life. Austria has decided to stop fighting the airlines and...
Share this story Russian state television wanted to show viewers how the army protects the skies over Rostov. It ended up showing the world a weapon nobody can quite identify. In a report aired on the Russia-1 channel, soldiers from a mobile fire group of the 51st Air...
Share this story Munich’s runways are 4,000 metres long. On 15 August 2026, a fully loaded Vietnam Airlines Boeing 787-9 used all of it, and then some. Flight VN34 to Hanoi left the ground from the grass beyond the end of the runway, clipped the approach lights...
Share this story Business jets are built to be quiet, smooth and economical. So a photograph of a Dassault Falcon 20 with a long cone of flame blasting out of one engine looks like a joke or a Photoshop. It is neither. In the late 1980s one Falcon 20, registered...
Share this story Ask why airliners cruise at about 40,000 feet and you get one of two answers. The aerodynamic one: they are pressed up against the coffin corner, where the stall and the speed of sound close in from both sides. The regulatory one: flight level 410 is...
Share this story Look closely at the canopy of a Red Arrows Hawk, a Harrier or a T-6 Texan II and you will see thin, wavy lines running across the transparency like a child’s drawing of lightning. They are not cracks, and they are not heating wires. They are...
Share this story On a moonless night over the desert, the world outside a fighter canopy is black. No horizon, no terrain, no other aircraft, only the glow of the instruments. Then the pilot flips two small tubes down in front of their visor, and the landscape...
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Share this story Watch an F-15 Eagle come in to land and you will see a large panel rise up on its back, just behind the cockpit, like a door opening into the airflow. It is the speed brake, and on the Eagle it is big enough to earn the nickname barn door. It exists...
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