Share this story In the opening minutes of Octopussy (1983), Roger Moore’s James Bond escapes an exploding hangar in a jet barely bigger than he is, outruns a heat-seeking missile, then coasts up to a petrol station and deadpans: “Fill her up,...
Share this story On a June afternoon in 1988, in front of thousands of airshow spectators, a brand-new Airbus A320 — the most advanced airliner in the world, on its very first passenger flight — flew a slow, low pass over a small French airfield, sank...
Share this story Most water bombers are propeller aircraft, and for good reason: they fly low and slow over fires, scooping and dropping in tight mountain valleys. The Beriev Be-200 does it all on jet power. It skims a lake at nearly 220 km/h, swallows 12 tonnes of...
Share this story On a freezing January evening in 1989, a nearly new Boeing 737 fell out of the sky less than a kilometre short of the runway and struck the embankment of the M1 motorway. Forty-seven of the 126 people on board died. The cruel twist: the engine that...
Share this story On August 9, an Etihad Airways Airbus A320 lifted out of Abu Dhabi bound for Tashkent, reopening a link to the old Silk Road — and, with it, an entire country’s worth of onward connections. The new daily nonstop is only half the story....
Share this story Hollywood Burbank Airport is the little airport that Angelenos love precisely because it is not LAX. Two terminals, a walk across the tarmac to the stairs, quick hops to Las Vegas and the Bay Area. It is not the sort of place you associate with a...
Share this story The dream was an electric jet that would whisk you between cities in near silence, lifting off vertically from a rooftop and cruising on stubby wings packed with tiny fans. Lilium, the Munich start-up that raised well over a billion dollars chasing...
Share this story July was, by Airbus’s recent standards, a quiet month. The European planemaker handed over 67 aircraft to 39 customers — a step down from 89 in June and 81 in May. And yet, halfway-plus through 2026, Airbus is still comfortably in...
Share this story In 1934, Americans looked up over Miami and saw something that made no sense: an aeroplane flying under what appeared to be a giant garden umbrella. It was not a stunt or a cartoon. It was the Nemeth Parasol, one of the strangest aircraft that ever...
Share this story Most aircraft try to look sleek. The Sikorsky S-64 Skycrane does not bother. It is, essentially, a flying spine: a long open backbone with two turbine engines and a six-blade rotor bolted on top, a cockpit at the front, tall stalky legs, and a hook...
Share this story Every time you settle into an airliner seat at 35,000 feet, sealed comfortably against air so thin and cold it would kill you in minutes, you are enjoying an idea that first flew on the last day of 1938. Its name was the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, and...
Share this story After a certification saga that outlasted a pandemic, three Boeing CEOs and the better part of a decade, the smallest jet in the 737 MAX family is finally legal to carry passengers. On 3 August, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration granted Boeing...
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