Share this story Two minutes and thirty-three seconds passed between the moment an Airbus A310 stopped doing what its crew believed it was doing, and the moment it hit a hillside in the Kuznetsk Alatau. Seventy-five people died. The story is usually told as a simple...
Share this story Five years ago this month, a US Marine Corps F-35B took off from a British aircraft carrier, landed on an American assault ship, took on fuel and weapons, and flew off again to attack a second set of targets. The Marine Corps called it the first time...
Share this story The raid was supposed to take thirty minutes. Sixteen helicopters, a four-minute flight, two Somali commanders lifted out of a building near the Olympic Hotel, and home. What happened instead ran for seventeen hours and cost eighteen American lives,...
Share this story In 1933 Boeing built the aeroplane that made every other airliner in the world obsolete overnight. All-metal, cantilever low wing, retractable undercarriage, autopilot, de-icing boots, a heated and insulated cabin, and 189 miles an hour in cruise. It...
Share this story At about twenty to eight on the evening of 15 May 1941, after a day of weather bad enough to keep everyone waiting, a small silver aeroplane with no propeller took off from RAF Cranwell and flew for seventeen minutes. It was not the first jet aircraft...
Share this story An Airbus A330 of that weight should touch down at about 135 knots. On 13 April 2010, Cathay Pacific 780 arrived at Hong Kong at 231 knots — with both thrust levers at idle, one engine stuck at seventy percent power, the other stuck below idle,...
Share this story Six Grumman Avengers took off from Midway on the morning of 4 June 1942. It was the aircraft’s first day of combat. One came back, flown by a pilot with no elevator control, no flaps, no compass, no radio, a dead gunner behind him and sixty-four...
Share this story Everybody who knows anything about the Antonov An-2 knows the same thing about it: that the flight manual has no stall speed, and that if the engine quits you simply hold the stick back and the aeroplane parachutes gently to earth at 40 km/h. It is a...
Share this story At two minutes past noon on 21 February 1973, the co-pilot of a Libyan Boeing 727 told air traffic control in Cairo that he was ten miles out and ready to descend. He was a hundred and five miles away, in the wrong country, with two Israeli Phantoms...
Share this story At half past four on the morning of 16 October 1936, standing beside a single-engined monoplane at RAAF Richmond outside Sydney, a 27-year-old New Zealander gave the assembled press a clear instruction. If she went down in the Tasman Sea, nobody was...
Share this story At 3:46 in the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1935, a four-engined flying boat lifted off the water at Alameda, California, and set course west across an ocean that no aeroplane had ever crossed on a schedule. Around twenty thousand people were...
Share this story In 1937 Focke-Wulf flew a fighter that was roughly 80 km/h faster than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 then in service, using exactly the same engines. It had twice the range. It weighed twice as much and still outran the thing it was compared against. Nine...
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