Share this story On 31 December 2025 a deadline arrived that had been twenty years in the making. From that date, under European law, no aircraft registered in the EU was allowed to carry a halon portable fire extinguisher in its cabin. Large parts of the fleet missed...
Share this story An aircraft does not care how high the runway is. It cares how thick the air is. On a hot afternoon at a mountain airport, the air can be so thin that the aircraft behaves as if it were taking off thousands of feet higher than the altimeter says. It...
Share this story You look up, the jet is already past, and only then does the sky crack: two sharp bangs, a fraction of a second apart. The F/A-18 Hornet above you did not “break” anything at that moment. It had been flying faster than sound for some time....
Share this story It looked like the future: a long, polished needle of a fuselage, four jet engines tucked into two slim nacelles, and a tandem bubble canopy perched on top. On 2 April 1947, the Convair XB-46 took off from San Diego and flew for 90 minutes to Muroc...
Share this story Japan’s next jet trainer may come with an instructor who is not in the cockpit at all. In an investor presentation dated 6 October 2026, Kawasaki Heavy Industries showed a concept for a next-generation trainer aircraft, built around an AI...
Share this story Since 2016, every jet in Biman Bangladesh Airlines’ fleet has been a Boeing. On 7 October 2026, that changed. Bangladesh’s flag carrier signed a firm order with Airbus for ten aircraft: four A350-900 widebodies and six A321neo...
Share this story On 10 February 1906, King Edward VII smashed a bottle against the bow of a new battleship at Portsmouth. A year after work on her began, HMS Dreadnought went to sea for trials, and every other battleship in the world, including all of Britain’s...
Share this story On paper, the X-57 Maxwell was one of the most exciting aircraft NASA had drawn in decades: a small, all-electric airplane with fourteen propellers strung along a skinny wing, promising to cruise five times more efficiently than the twin it was based...
Share this story Every fighter you have ever seen has a tail. Fins keep it pointing forward, rudders turn it, and for a stealth aircraft those same fins are big flat radar reflectors. In 1997, NASA and McDonnell Douglas flew a small, sinister-looking jet over the...
Share this story It had no wings worth the name, no engine running at touchdown and only one chance to get it right. On 5 August 1975, NASA test pilot John Manke brought the X-24B lifting body down from 60,000 feet without power and landed it on the concrete main...
Share this story On 12 December 1953, Chuck Yeager pushed the Bell X-1A to Mach 2.44, faster than any human had flown. Seconds later the rocket plane went completely out of control. It rolled, yawed and tumbled end over end, slamming Yeager’s helmet into the...
Share this story If you take your first flying lesson in America a couple of years from now, there is a growing chance it will be in an Italian two-seater with a carbon-fibre fuselage. Tecnam announced on 5 October 2026 that it is bringing its P2008JC NG trainer to...
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