Share this story Look at it once and you understand why the legend stuck. The Gee Bee R-1 is a barrel with a propeller bolted to the front, a wing that looks borrowed from something half its weight, and a cockpit shoved so far back it is practically part of the tail....
Share this story On 2 June this year, SAS flight SK969 lifted out of Copenhagen bound for Mumbai, ending a seventeen-year absence from India. Four hours later, somewhere over Azerbaijan, it turned around and flew home. The aircraft had departed without final clearance...
Share this story United spent a fortnight teasing this announcement with a reality-TV-style video full of coded clues, which the internet duly spent a fortnight decoding. On Tuesday morning, in a hangar at Newark, the airline finally said it out loud. Ten new...
Share this story Two minutes and six seconds into its take-off roll, with less than 800 feet of a 15,000-foot runway left, an aeroplane made almost entirely of paper honeycomb and graphite fibre finally came unstuck from Edwards Air Force Base. Its wingtips had been...
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 Most airlines mark an anniversary with a commemorative decal near the boarding door and a press release nobody reads. All Nippon Airways paints cartoon monsters across an entire Boeing 787 and sends it to another continent. On Monday, ANA confirmed...
Share this story On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in...
Share this story Almost every maritime patrol aircraft in history has been something else first. The P-3 Orion was an airliner. The Nimrod was the Comet. The P-8 is a 737. You take a tube with wings and long legs, and you fill it with sonar equipment. The Breguet...
Share this story In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is...
Share this story Some aeroplanes shout. The Percival Mew Gull whispered — a slip of a thing, barely twenty feet long, its wings not much wider than a family car, built almost entirely of wood and glue in a shed at Gravesend. You could have mistaken it for a toy....
Share this story Some aeroplanes are designed. The Lockheed Constellation looks like it was sculpted — by someone who had been told, sternly, that a machine carrying forty people across an ocean had no business being ugly. That curved, dolphin-backed fuselage....
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