Share this story On 24 September 1929, Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle climbed into the rear cockpit of a biplane at Mitchel Field on Long Island, and somebody pulled a canvas hood over his head. From that moment he could see nothing outside. He could see only a handful of...
Share this story At two o’clock in the afternoon on 6 October 1973, Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the sky over the Suez Canal filled with Egyptian jets. More than 200 of them crossed the canal at low level and fanned out across the Sinai,...
Share this story Shortly after takeoff from RAAF Base Amberley on 18 July 2006, the crew of an Australian F-111 heard something no F-111 crew in Australia had heard in thirty years. The control tower was on the radio: their left main wheel had just fallen off. What...
Share this story India wants 60 new military transport aircraft, and it wants most of them made in India. Lockheed Martin has now said exactly how it would do that: build a dozen C-130J Super Hercules in Georgia, and the other 48 in India with Tata. The offer, set out...
Share this story In early October 2026, Ukrainian outlets including Militarnyi relayed a claim that a Ukrainian Air Force Mirage 2000-5F had shot down a Russian cruise missile with its 30mm DEFA cannon rather than a missile. The claim first appeared on the X account...
Share this story For about two years after March 2015, if you flew with almost any European airline and one of the pilots stepped out to use the lavatory, a flight attendant stepped in. They did not touch the controls. They simply stood or sat in the cockpit until the...
Share this story Thirty-four years ago tonight, a little after half past six, a Boeing 747 freighter fell out of the sky over Amsterdam and into a block of flats. El Al Flight 1862 had taken off from Schiphol just over thirteen minutes earlier. Both engines on its...
Share this story Key West International sits three feet above the Atlantic. Its single runway, 09/27, is 5,076 feet long and 100 feet wide, and there is an engineered arrestor bed at each end because there is nowhere else for an aeroplane to go. Airliners land there...
Share this story The Air Serbia jet was doing everything right. It had landed at Paris Charles de Gaulle on the evening of Friday, 2 October 2026, and was standing still on the apron, waiting for instructions from air traffic control. Then an easyJet Airbus taxied...
Share this story Air Chief Marshal A.P. Singh did not use his farewell press conference to celebrate. With four weeks left before he retires, the head of the Indian Air Force sat down in New Delhi on 3 October 2026 and laid out, in unusually plain words, how far his...
Share this story At 9:04 in the morning on 30 March 1982, Space Shuttle Columbia came out of a clear desert sky over southern New Mexico and settled onto a runway made of gypsum. Around it, for miles, there was nothing but more of the same. It was the end of STS-3,...
Share this story A carrier landing is the only landing in aviation where the pilot pushes the throttles forward at the moment of touchdown. The jet slams onto the deck, the tailhook drags across the steel, and the engines are already screaming at full power. If the...
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