Share this story On 19 October 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration issued airworthiness directive 2026-20-14, ordering operators of 1,987 American-registered Boeing 737NGs to measure the free play in their horizontal stabiliser pivot hinges and jackscrews. The...
Share this story Over Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on 15 June 2012, a US Navy photographer captured an image most people would rather not think about. The canopy of the Blue Angels’ left wingman’s F/A-18 Hornet sat approximately 18 inches from the...
Share this story Look at the tactical display of a modern F-16 and you will see aircraft its own radar has never touched. A contact a hundred miles away, already labelled hostile. A friendly four-ship on the far side of a mountain range. A tanker orbit, a ship, a...
Share this story On 10 January 1956, ground crews in Turkey and West Germany let go of the first nine of hundreds of giant plastic balloons. Each one carried a camera gondola about the size of a refrigerator. The cover story said they were studying the weather. In...
Share this story Behind the painted nose cone of almost every airliner sits a flat disc about the size of a dustbin lid, nodding up and down and sweeping left and right, all flight long. It is the weather radar, and on a summer night over the Alps or the Gulf of...
Share this story Stand at the end of a runway and watch an airliner come in to land, and you will see its wings rise gently from the fuselage into a shallow V. Now watch a US Marine Corps Harrier hover over the same runway. Its wings do the opposite: they droop from...
Share this story Every aeroplane has a part you have never heard of that is holding more of your life in its hands than the engines are. On a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, that part was a steel screw turning inside a nut, mounted near the top of the vertical fin. The screw...
Share this story At 10:27 on the morning of 24 October 1944, eight dive bombers from the carrier USS Intrepid tipped over above the Sibuyan Sea and went for the biggest target any of their crews had ever seen. Below them steamed Musashi, one of the two heaviest...
Share this story The most violent test an airliner engine ever faces happens on the ground. With the engine running at its maximum permitted speed, a small explosive charge at the root of one fan blade cuts it loose. The blade must be stopped by the engine casing, and...
Share this story A heat-seeking missile chases something it can feel: the hot exhaust of an engine. A radar-guided missile chases something it cannot see at all until a radar wave bounces off it. That difference is why radar missiles can kill from beyond visual range,...
Share this story Counting aircraft from orbit is a strange way to follow a weapons programme, but with China it is often the only way. On 5 October 2026 a commercial satellite passed over Xi’an-Yanliang airfield in Shaanxi province and photographed four KJ-3000...
Share this story For seven years the Thanh Hoa Bridge simply refused to fall. American aircraft flew more than 870 sorties against the “Dragon’s Jaw” south of Hanoi and lost 11 aircraft doing it. Then, in the spring of 1972, a handful of Phantom...
Recent Comments