Share this story Russia’s most numerous home-built jet airliner has just been granted five extra years of life. On 12 October, Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency, Rosaviatsia, approved an increase in the permitted service life of the Superjet 100 from...
Share this story Four hours out of Washington, somewhere over the dark North Atlantic, the crew of United Airlines flight UA946 got the message no twin-jet pilot wants: a problem with one of their two engines. They declared an emergency, turned the Boeing 767 around,...
Share this story At 300 knots you are covering a nautical mile every twelve seconds. That is the governing constraint on every calculation a pilot does in the air: not whether an answer is exactly right, but whether it arrives before the situation it described has...
Share this story A radar is a very simple liar detector. It shouts a pulse into the dark, waits, and measures how long the echo takes to come back. Distance is just time multiplied by the speed of light and halved. There is no judgement in it and no scepticism....
Share this story About seven minutes before Apollo 11’s third stage fired to send it to the Moon on 16 July 1969, the spacecraft was over the open Pacific, far from any ground station. Houston was still talking to the crew, through a modified Air Force jet...
Share this story Pilots are trained for bird strikes. Nobody trains for fish. Yet on 30 March 1987, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 climbing out of Juneau, Alaska, was hit by a fish that had been dropped by an eagle. The story ran in newspapers on 1 April, so plenty of...
Share this story Every two years at Zhuhai, China parks a row of radar trucks on the apron and lets the world photograph them. The placards promise a great deal. Metre-wave arrays that see what microwave radars cannot. Passive sets that never transmit....
Share this story It begins with a reclining chair and an hour of pure oxygen. Before a U-2 Dragon Lady pilot climbs towards 70,000 feet, the physiological support team seals him into a yellow full-pressure suit, screws on the helmet and parks him in a lounger to flush...
Share this story When a fighter pilot slams the throttle into afterburner, it feels like a direct command to the engine. It is not. On a modern jet the throttle is a request, sent as an electrical signal to a box of electronics bolted to the engine, and that box...
Share this story The third strike in four days was the one nobody walked away from. On Saturday, 10 October 2026, a projectile slammed into King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, the Saudi capital’s main gateway, killing at least 12 people and wounding...
Share this story Telluride Regional sits on a mesa in south-west Colorado at 9,069.7 feet, which makes it the highest commercial-service airport in the United States by a wide margin. The runway is 7,111 feet long and ends, at both ends, in air. The FAA’s own...
Share this story Stealth is an argument about angles. Shape an airframe so that almost everything a radar sends at it leaves in some other direction, coat what is left so that part of the remainder turns into heat, and the energy coming back to the transmitter falls...
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