Share this story A man standing near the perimeter of RAF Valley on Wednesday morning watched a jet take off, the way he had watched hundreds before, and knew within a second or two that this one was wrong. By the time the aircraft had climbed to what he estimated at...
Share this story A sixty-six-year-old captain walks out to an Air New Zealand jet in Auckland, flies a domestic sector, and goes home. Entirely legal. Put the same captain on a service to Los Angeles and the flight cannot depart. There is no single retirement age for...
Share this story For sixteen years she was the most photographed privately owned jet in Britain: a Hawker Hunter painted banana yellow at the nose, fading through red and blue into deep-space black at the tail, with a scatter of stars down the fuselage. Airshow crowds...
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Share this story Radar does one simple thing extremely fast. It shouts into the dark, listens for an echo, and times how long the echo took to come back. Everything else is refinement. The shout is a pulse of radio energy. The echo is a vanishingly small fraction of...
Share this story A fighter lands, taxis clear, and stops. The canopy stays down. The pilot stays strapped in. The engine keeps running at idle while somebody walks a live fuel hose up to the aircraft and plugs it into a jet that is, by any normal safety standard, an...
Share this story Every few years an airline announces the world’s longest flight, collects the headlines, and then quietly kills it. Singapore Airlines did it twice. Air Canada is doing it right now with Vancouver to Singapore. Qantas is about to do the opposite...
Share this story On 22 September 1946 a four-engined Douglas DC-4 lifted off from Madrid and turned south. Thirty-six hours, three stops and one unscheduled diversion later it landed at Morón in Buenos Aires. Iberia had just become the first European airline to...
Share this story For forty-five years, the only legal way to fly into West Berlin was down one of three lanes twenty miles wide, drawn across hostile territory by a committee in 1945. Stay inside them and you were untouchable. Drift out and you could be shot down, and...
Share this story There was never supposed to be a Sidewinder. The Navy did not ask for one and the Air Force did not want one. It exists because a physicist at a desert laboratory in California decided the official requirements were wrong, worked on it out of the...
Share this story In 1952 a group of scientists at MIT was asked a straightforward question: how vulnerable are the United States and Canada to aerial bombing? Their answer was that a line of search radars should be built across the Arctic, as rapidly as possible. Two...
Share this story Put a Global Hawk and a Triton side by side and most people would call it the same aeroplane. Same enormous wing, same whale-shaped fuselage, same V-tail, same manufacturer. They are not the same aeroplane, and the difference comes down to one...
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