Share this story The President of the United States has Air Force One. The Pope, head of a state of less than half a square kilometre, has no air force, no airline and no airport. Yet he flies more than most heads of state, and when two French Rafales formed up on his...
Share this story Modern fighters carry missiles that can hit a target they will never see. Radar finds it, a data link tracks it, and a missile covers the last 50 or 100 kilometres on its own. Yet for most of the jet age, one of the most important rules in air combat...
Share this story Twelve years after Air Algérie flight 5017 fell out of the sky over northern Mali, a French court has named someone responsible. On 28 September 2026, the Paris Criminal Court found Spanish charter airline Swiftair guilty of involuntary manslaughter...
Share this story A single fighter jet, two bombs, and the busiest place in town at the busiest time of day. Around noon on Monday 28 September 2026, a Myanmar military jet struck near the main wholesale market in Kyauktaw, in the country’s western Rakhine State....
Share this story In early 1942, a woman in Washington, D.C. commuted to her office in Baltimore every day in her own aeroplane. Her husband mentioned it to his boss, Colonel William H. Tunner, who was scouring the country for pilots to deliver new aircraft from...
Share this story Seven years after he became the first human being in space, Yuri Gagarin was back in a very ordinary cockpit. On the morning of 27 March 1968 he climbed into a two-seat MiG-15UTI jet trainer at Chkalovsky air base near Moscow, with his instructor...
Share this story It was meant to be a birthday treat: a short helicopter ride over the farmland of Quebec’s Montérégie region on a Saturday afternoon. Shortly after take-off on 26 September, the helicopter came down in a field in...
Share this story The cargo manifest was short. Two giant pandas, some fresh bamboo, water, a few favourite treats and their keepers from Zoo Atlanta. That was the entire load on a FedEx Boeing 777F that took off from Chengdu in the small hours of Sunday 27 September...
Share this story Open a flight-tracking app on almost any day and look at the Black Sea or the Baltic. Among the airliners you will often find something that does not belong: a four-engined jet flying long racetrack patterns off a coastline, or a drone orbiting at...
Share this story Thunderstorms had kept the Hindenburg circling for hours. When the giant airship finally turned in towards the mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, on the evening of 6 May 1937, reporters, photographers and newsreel crews were...
Share this story For decades pilots have passed a quiet piece of advice down the line: if you are struggling, do not tell the doctor. Admitting depression or anxiety could mean months on the ground, a special-issuance process that can drag past a year, and for some,...
Share this story On 2 September 1944, a 20-year-old US Navy pilot named George Herbert Walker Bush flew his TBM Avenger into the flak over Chichijima, a small Japanese-held island in the Bonin chain north of Iwo Jima. His target was the island’s radio station....
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