Share this story Every airline maintenance manager on earth felt a small twinge of recognition on Tuesday afternoon. An emergency escape slide inflated on the ground, with nobody evacuating, because somebody moved a door handle in the wrong sequence. It is one of the...
Share this story Around lunchtime on Tuesday 8 September, the software that turns filed flight plans into something British air traffic controllers can work with stopped doing it properly. Everything downstream of that failure is the story: roughly 2,000 cancelled...
Share this story The plan was to take off at 8:15 in the morning, roughly the minute United 175 left Boston Logan, and to be over United’s Flight Training Center at 9:03, the exact minute that aircraft struck the South Tower. A Boeing 777 in United colours,...
Share this story On 19 February 1928, a 20-year-old German woman climbed into the cockpit of a Junkers F.13 named Kiek in die Welt — Berlin dialect for “look in the world” — and flew it for Lufthansa. She is generally credited as the first...
Share this story On the morning of 20 April 1933, in the Tanezrouft, Bill Lancaster took out a fuel card and wrote what he knew would be his last message. He had been down in the Sahara for eight days. He had no water left. Exactly one year earlier, to the day, a man...
Share this story Star Alliance has 25-odd member airlines and access to more than a thousand airport lounges around the world. It owns six of them. Six, in twenty-nine years: Los Angeles, Amsterdam Schiphol, Paris Charles de Gaulle, Buenos Aires Ezeiza, Rio de Janeiro...
Share this story At 15:55 this afternoon, a Boeing 787-9 in a deep indigo livery touched down at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and an hour and a half later it went back the way it came. Flight RX0873 from Riyadh, inbound. RX0874 to Riyadh, outbound. Every day...
Share this story In November 2024, the United States sent two B-52H bombers to fly over the Bahrain International Airshow. One of them then parked on the static display, the first time a B-52 had done so at Sakhir. Nobody pretended it was a routine appearance. It was...
Share this story In 1975, Switzerland moved a Convair 990 Coronado from Zurich to Lucerne. It took barges, closed roads and a considerable amount of nerve, and the whole country watched. Half a century later, they are seriously proposing to do it again — with...
Share this story Donald Trump does not usually take an interest in the business jet market. On Monday he did, in capital letters, on his own social network, and by Tuesday afternoon Bombardier’s share price had taken a seven per cent hit and a Republican senator from...
Share this story At 23:34:49 on the night of 1 July 2002, the collision avoidance system aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M over southern Germany told its crew to climb. Seconds later the air traffic controller told them to descend. They descended. On the Boeing 757 converging...
Share this story At about twenty to two on the morning of 28 November 1979, someone in Air New Zealand’s navigation section changed two numbers in a computer. The McMurdo waypoint stored in the ground system moved roughly two degrees and fifteen minutes of...
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