Share this story There is a helicopter you can buy, fly away from your own field, and operate in American airspace without a pilot certificate, without a medical, without registration, and without any airworthiness approval whatsoever. It is not a loophole and it is...
On 11 October 1943 Col. Neel Kearby led four P-47 Thunderbolts into nearly fifty Japanese aircraft over Wewak and was credited with six kills, then a USAAF record for one mission. He won the Medal of Honor, scored 22 victories and was killed near the same airfield five months later.
Radar gives range and no identity. Infrared gives bearing and no range. Deciding that both describe one aeroplane is the whole of sensor fusion, and the Pentagon test record shows how hard it was.
Thirteen sections, about a thousand words, and no pilot certificate, no medical, no registration and no airworthiness certificate. What FAR Part 103 actually allows, and the four numbers it costs.
Share this story Everyone remembers Britain's three V-bombers: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan and the Handley Page Victor. Almost nobody remembers the fourth. It had straight wings, engines stacked one on top of the other, and a job description that amounted to:...
Share this story In the mid-1950s Dassault built a small strike jet that nobody wanted. The French Air Force was not interested, and neither were the NATO air forces it had been pitched to. Then the French Navy took a look at a bigger, more powerful version, and...
Share this story On 29 July 1950, fourteen paying passengers boarded an aircraft at RAF Northolt, west of London, and flew to Paris Le Bourget. Nothing about the trip was unusual except the engines. It was the first scheduled airline flight by any turbine-powered...
Share this story Most pilots today learn on aeroplanes with a nosewheel. They taxi like a shopping trolley that wants to go straight. Then one day they climb into a Piper Cub, a Super Decathlon or a P-51 Mustang, and discover that the little wheel at the back changes...
Share this story An aeroplane has it easy. Point it down a runway, let the wings do the work, and a few simple controls take care of the rest. A helicopter has to make its own wind. Its wings are the rotor blades, whirling overhead at a few hundred revolutions per...
Share this story Ask a Patrouille de France pilot about the jet they fly, and you may get an unexpectedly modest answer. They all come from the Rafale or the Mirage 2000, one of them told British forces broadcaster BFBS this year, and by comparison the little red,...
Share this story America's air traffic controllers are finally getting the raise Congress approved for them in April. On Friday, 16 October, the US Department of Transportation and the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA) announced a deal that releases...
Share this story At lunchtime on Friday, 16 October, a flight of Austrian Air Force Eurofighters touched down at Klagenfurt, the civil airport of the southern state of Carinthia. Until Monday they will not train, not fly displays and not do circuits. They will sit on...
Share this story Airliners are usually broken up for parts when they are old, tired and worth more as spares than as aeroplanes. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 is none of those things. It is one of the two most in-demand narrowbodies on the planet, with airlines waiting years...
Share this story Every second a Saab Gripen is in the air, a computer is quietly stopping it from tumbling out of the sky. The Gripen was designed to be aerodynamically unstable, because an unstable jet turns harder and faster, and it only flies straight because its...
Share this story It does not look like a doomsday aircraft yet. Tail number 510 is a plain grey Lockheed Martin C-130J-30 Super Hercules, four propellers and a long fuselage, sitting on the ramp at Marietta, Georgia. But on 15 October the US Navy accepted it as the...
Share this story The car drove up a ramp that curled over until it was hanging upside down, stuck to the concrete by its own suction. Then it ran off the end into thin air, fired its thrusters, flipped itself upright and settled onto its wheels. That was the opening...
Share this story Somewhere over the Mojave Desert, in the first week of October, a Raptor pilot did something no fighter pilot had done before: sending a new mission plan to a combat drone flying alongside, and letting the drone take it from there. The US Air Force...