Share this story Ask why airliners cruise at about 40,000 feet and you get one of two answers. The aerodynamic one: they are pressed up against the coffin corner, where the stall and the speed of sound close in from both sides. The regulatory one: flight level 410 is...
Share this story In the summer of 1976 a sound arrived on the shortwave bands that nobody had asked for. It was a hard, flat tapping, roughly ten beats a second, and it walked. One week it sat on top of an amateur band, the next it was parked across an aeronautical...
Share this story On the morning of 11 September 1962, the President of the United States stepped off his aircraft at the Redstone Arsenal airfield in Huntsville, Alabama, and shook hands with the man who had built Hitler’s V-2. Wernher von Braun, now director of...
Share this story In early 1942, a woman in Washington, D.C. commuted to her office in Baltimore every day in her own aeroplane. Her husband mentioned it to his boss, Colonel William H. Tunner, who was scouring the country for pilots to deliver new aircraft from...
Share this story At 5:17 in the morning of 8 May 1927, a white biplane staggered off the grass at Le Bourget, so heavy with fuel that it barely cleared the trees at the end of the field. In the open cockpit sat two of France’s great airmen: Charles Nungesser,...
Share this story On Sunday a FedEx Boeing 777F landed in Atlanta carrying nothing but two giant pandas, their bamboo and their keepers. It made headlines, but it was not unusual. Every year airlines and air forces move racehorses, zoo animals, livestock and even...
Share this story Nine red jets pull up in front of the crowd, and on a word from the leader, “Smoke on, go,” thick white trails pour from their tails. Seconds later, red and blue join the white, and the Union Flag is painted across the sky. Display smoke...
Share this story A helicopter hovering 200 feet above a field looks like the safest thing in the sky. It is going nowhere, slowly. But if its single engine stops at that moment, the pilot is in one of the worst places a helicopter can be: too high to simply drop onto...
Share this story It was meant to be a birthday treat: a short helicopter ride over the farmland of Quebec’s Montérégie region on a Saturday afternoon. Shortly after take-off on 26 September, the helicopter came down in a field in...
Share this story The cargo manifest was short. Two giant pandas, some fresh bamboo, water, a few favourite treats and their keepers from Zoo Atlanta. That was the entire load on a FedEx Boeing 777F that took off from Chengdu in the small hours of Sunday 27 September...
Share this story The first approach into Bengaluru did not work out, so the crew of IndiGo flight 6E 6542 went around. On the second attempt, in gusty winds on Sunday 27 September, the tail of their Airbus A321 touched the runway. The jet landed safely and everyone...
Share this story Manchester does not get many jumbo jets any more. On Saturday afternoon, 26 September, it got one it had not planned for, and by Sunday there were two of them parked side by side on the ramp. Lufthansa flight LH470 from Frankfurt to Toronto was...
Recent Comments