Share this story Most passengers assume an airliner fills up before every flight with just enough fuel for the trip plus reserves. Very often, that is not what happens. On a large share of short and medium-haul flights, airlines deliberately load extra fuel at the...
Share this story Every October, a few dozen NATO fighter jets fly a rehearsal for a mission their crews hope they never fly for real: delivering an American nuclear bomb on behalf of the whole alliance. The exercise is called Steadfast Noon. This year it began on 13...
Share this story On 18 April 1945, three weeks before the war in Europe ended, a Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter of Jagdverband 44 was taking off near Munich when its left wheel hit debris. The jet swerved off the runway and exploded in flames. Its pilot, Colonel...
Share this story In September 1966 a French prototype that could take off vertically flew at Mach 2.04 in level flight. Nothing that could hover had ever gone that fast. To manage it, the Dassault Mirage IIIV carried nine jet engines: one large turbofan for forward...
Share this story On 29 July 1964, a silver test aircraft from southern Germany went faster than sound. That alone was nothing new in 1964; the Bell X-1 had done it 17 years earlier. What made the EWR VJ 101 C special was that it could also take off straight up, hover,...
Share this story At 07:00 on Tuesday, 13 October 2026, the first flight left Hollywood Burbank Airport’s brand-new passenger terminal. The $1.3 billion building, on the opposite side of the airfield from the old one, replaces a complex whose original buildings...
Share this story The US Air Force asked for three ideas and got more than thirty. When the Air Force Test Pilot School invited researchers to propose flight tests for the X-62 VISTA in fiscal years 2027 and 2028, it hoped for three test concepts. It received more than...
Share this story Two years after it received its first IRIS-T SLM fire unit, the German Air Force has finally fired the system for real. In mid-October 2026, soldiers of Air Defence Missile Group 61 from Todendorf launched a live IRIS-T SLM missile at the NATO Missile...
Share this story The FAA has grounded the Elixir, the French two-seat trainer that only won its US type certificate last year. An emergency airworthiness directive published in the Federal Register on 13 October 2026, effective the next day, bars every Elixir in the...
Share this story The US Air Force’s cheap, autonomous successor to the MQ-9 Reaper is supposed to be flying in operational form within two years. Speaking on a panel at the AUSA conference in Washington on 14 October 2026, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said...
Share this story Six people, five adults and a child, died on Tuesday night, 13 October 2026, when a Piper PA-46-350P Malibu Mirage crashed in the Town of Dellona, west of Wisconsin Dells. The Sauk County Sheriff’s Office said everyone aboard the six-seat...
Share this story Six days after it missed Washington’s final deadline, Israel has signed for new attack helicopters after all. On 14 October 2026 the Israeli Ministry of Defense said it had signed an agreement with the US Department of War to buy 12 Boeing...
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