Share this story Two hours out of Barcelona, somewhere west of the Iberian coast, the cabin of Delta Air Lines flight DL251 began to fill with smoke. The Airbus A330-300 was bound for Boston with 296 passengers on board. Instead of pressing on across the Atlantic, the...
Share this story A four-engined turboprop lurches, drops and shudders through a wall of grey. Rain hammers the windscreen, the instruments blur, and the flight engineer in the middle seat works the power levers. Then, suddenly, the cockpit fills with light: blue sky...
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Share this story Twice an hour, for three minutes, the North Atlantic fell silent. At a quarter past and a quarter to, every wireless operator on every ship within reach of 500 kilohertz stopped transmitting, pressed his headphones a little harder against his ears,...
Share this story On the evening of 17 March 1970, Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. The Shuttle worked like a bus: no reservations, no security check, and you paid your fare on board once the aircraft was in...
Share this story Walk around any aircraft parked on a ramp and you will see them fluttering in the breeze: long red ribbons printed with three words in white capitals. REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. They hang from pitot tubes, landing gear, engine intakes and ejection seats,...
Share this story Open a flight-tracking app on almost any day and look at the Black Sea or the Baltic. Among the airliners you will often find something that does not belong: a four-engined jet flying long racetrack patterns off a coastline, or a drone orbiting at...
Share this story Every pilot learns the phrase in their first few hours of ground school: eight hours bottle to throttle. It sounds simple. It is also only the beginning of the rules, and plenty of pilots who think they know them have been caught out, sometimes in...
Share this story Watch an F-15 Eagle come in to land and you will see a large panel rise up on its back, just behind the cockpit, like a door opening into the airflow. It is the speed brake, and on the Eagle it is big enough to earn the nickname barn door. It exists...
Share this story At 8:40 on the morning of 15 June 1919, a big biplane came out of the low cloud over County Galway. The pilot saw a flat green field near the Marconi wireless station at Clifden and put the aircraft down. The field was a bog. The wheels sank, the nose...
Share this story Thunderstorms had kept the Hindenburg circling for hours. When the giant airship finally turned in towards the mooring mast at Naval Air Station Lakehurst, New Jersey, on the evening of 6 May 1937, reporters, photographers and newsreel crews were...
Share this story For decades pilots have passed a quiet piece of advice down the line: if you are struggling, do not tell the doctor. Admitting depression or anxiety could mean months on the ground, a special-issuance process that can drag past a year, and for some,...
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