Boeing 777 Freighter Production Halted by a Wing-Part Dispute
Share this story Boeing has not finished a 777 Freighter in nearly two months. Not because of a strike, an engine shortage or a regulator. According to a Reuters exclusive published late on 23 October 2026, the line in Everett, Washington, stopped because a small...
Flight Levels and Transition Altitude: Why Pilots Set 29.92
Share this story Somewhere over Bedfordshire on an October afternoon, an easyJet Airbus and a Jet2 Boeing slide past each other at 35,000 feet, their contrails crossing in a giant X. Their safety does not depend on spotting each other. It depends on a number both...
St Elmo’s Fire on Aircraft: The Blue Glow Pilots See in Storms
Share this story It is the middle of the night over stormy country, and the windscreen of a KC-135 Stratotanker suddenly fills with light. Violet and blue tendrils branch across the glass like living lightning, crawling and flickering, while the instruments glow...
Airborne Weather Radar: How Pilots See Storms Through the Nose
Share this story Behind the painted nose cone of almost every airliner sits a flat disc about the size of a dustbin lid, nodding up and down and sweeping left and right, all flight long. It is the weather radar, and on a summer night over the Alps or the Gulf of...
Aircraft De-Icing and Anti-Icing: How Jets Beat the Ice
Share this story Snow is falling on a dark winter morning, and your airliner has not moved from the de-icing pad. A truck with a cherry-picker basket rolls alongside and a worker blasts the wings with a steaming orange liquid. Minutes later comes a second pass, this...
Katherine Stinson: The Flying Schoolgirl Who Looped and Flew Mail
Share this story On the evening of 9 July 1918, a small yellow biplane appeared out of the south over Edmonton, Alberta, following the railway line up from Calgary. In the cockpit sat a 27-year-old American woman. In a mailbag beside her were 259 letters, the first...
Dihedral and Anhedral: Why Some Wings Tilt Up and Others Droop
Share this story Stand at the end of a runway and watch an airliner come in to land, and you will see its wings rise gently from the fuselage into a shallow V. Now watch a US Marine Corps Harrier hover over the same runway. Its wings do the opposite: they droop from...
Elinor Smith: The Flying Flapper Who Flew Under Four Bridges
Share this story On Sunday 21 October 1928, a small Waco biplane dropped down over New York’s East River and flew under the Queensboro Bridge. Then under the Williamsburg Bridge. Then the Manhattan Bridge. Then the Brooklyn Bridge. Newsreel cameras caught her at...
Alaska Airlines 261: How a Lubrication Interval Grew Sevenfold
Share this story Every aeroplane has a part you have never heard of that is holding more of your life in its hands than the engines are. On a McDonnell Douglas MD-83, that part was a steel screw turning inside a nut, mounted near the top of the vertical fin. The screw...
Airworthiness Directives: The Four Types That Do Not Exist
Share this story Somewhere tonight a Boeing 737 will touch down harder than the crew intended. The cabin will jolt, a few people will say something unrepeatable, and everyone will carry on. It happens several hundred times a day somewhere in the world and it is almost...
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