Share this story The Kuwait theatre, early 1991, after dark. Two F-111Fs circle at medium altitude over a sixty-by-thirty-mile box of desert. In the right seat, a weapon systems officer stares at a small black-and-white screen where the sand has gone cool and grey and...
Share this story Twenty-seven years ago today, on 9 October 1999, a black aeroplane with NASA 844 on its fin took off from Edwards Air Force Base for an open-house display and landed again. Nobody knew it was the last flight any SR-71 Blackbird would ever make. The...
Share this story Ten years ago tonight, at about seven in the evening on 9 October 2016, the destroyer USS Mason was north of the Bab el-Mandeb strait in the Red Sea when two missiles came off the Houthi-held coast of Yemen. Mason fired two SM-2s and an Evolved...
Share this story At 13:20 UTC on 17 July 2014, a Boeing 777 in Malaysia Airlines colours was cruising at 33,000 feet over the wheat fields of the Donetsk region, a little under three hours out of Amsterdam. The cockpit voice recorder was running. The crew had no...
Share this story The seatbelt sign has been on for twenty minutes. Below the wing, the same patchwork of Hertfordshire fields drifts past for the second time, then the third. The aircraft banks gently right, levels, flies straight for a minute, banks right again....
Share this story Shortly after leaving Palma de Mallorca on the afternoon of Thursday, 13 October 1977, somewhere over the south of France, a young man with a pistol walked into the cockpit of a Lufthansa Boeing 737. The holiday flight to Frankfurt was carrying 86...
Share this story On the morning of 29 January 2026 a fat white airliner with a cockpit where its chin should be made a low pass over the Airbus wing factory at Broughton in North Wales, swung round and landed for the last time. It had flown in from Bordeaux. Over the...
Share this story The first images showed a column of black smoke rising over King Khalid International Airport. The next showed what was underneath it: a Saudia narrowbody standing at the terminal, its cabin burned out, fire crews around it. Nobody is believed to have...
Share this story Every time a drone shuts an airport, the same explanation appears within hours: the things are simply too small for radar to see. It is a tidy story. It is also wrong, and the measurement literature has been saying so for a decade. A DJI Phantom 3 and...
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 Listen to a fighter pilot reading back a heading or a squawk code and you will hear something odd: “two-seven-niner”, “tree”, “fife”. It sounds like a quirk of military slang. It is not. Those pronunciations are...
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