Share this story Ask a room full of aircraft owners what they are allowed to do to their own aeroplane and most will give you the same number. Thirty-two jobs, they will say. It is on the list, in Appendix A. Count them. There are thirty-one. The thirty-second was...
Share this story Two grey jets with the yellow-and-blue RMAF roundel on their intakes rolled to a stop at Labuan Air Base on Friday, 30 October 2026. They had flown down from Sacheon in South Korea, where Korea Aerospace Industries builds them, and they are the first...
Share this story At 12:32 on 7 April 1945, a lookout on the bridge of the battleship Yamato spotted the first wave of American carrier aircraft. Less than two hours later the largest battleship ever built rolled over and blew up, sending a mushroom cloud thousands of...
Share this story A domestic flight across the United States never belongs to one air traffic controller. It is passed from hand to hand like a baton: from a tower, to a radar room near the airport, to a string of en-route centres, and back down again at the other end....
Share this story On the morning of 26 September 1977, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with the word Skytrain painted along its fuselage took off from London Gatwick for New York’s JFK. Its passengers had not booked their seats weeks in advance. They had turned up,...
Share this story For six years, China’s reusable spaceplane has been one of spaceflight’s best-kept secrets. It launches on a rocket, stays in orbit for months, releases small objects, lands on a runway in the desert, and Beijing says almost nothing about...
Share this story A landplane accelerates down a smooth runway. A floatplane has to fight its way out of the water first, and water does not want to let go. The roar, the spray, the moment the nose drops and the aircraft suddenly skims like a speedboat: that is a...
Share this story In the early 1920s, the first aeroplane most Americans ever saw up close landed in a farmer’s pasture. A young man in a leather helmet climbed out of a battered biplane, offered rides for a few dollars, and if the crowd was big enough, someone...
Share this story On 19 August 1942, while Canadian soldiers died on the shingle beaches of Dieppe, the sky above them filled with more fighters than anyone had seen over France. By nightfall the Royal Air Force and its Allied squadrons had lost about 106 aircraft,...
Share this story Jet fighters had shot each other down before 1951, but never like this. Over the Yalu River in northwest Korea, a stretch of sky the Americans called MiG Alley, swept-wing jets met swept-wing jets for the first time in a sustained campaign. The North...
Share this story There are two numbers no airline pilot wants to say on the radio in the same breath: one landing gear leg that will not come down, and minutes of fuel left. On Sunday evening, 25 October, the crew of United Airlines flight 1854 dealt with both over...
Share this story The US Air Force has a tanker problem, and a Washington think tank has just put a price on fixing it. In a report released on 27 October, the Hudson Institute argues that the Air Force should stop buying the KC-46A Pegasus sooner than planned and...
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