Share this story Korean Air signed the paperwork in Seoul this week, and the number on it is the largest in the airline’s history: roughly 60 trillion won, about $44.8 billion, for 103 Boeing aircraft and the engines to keep them running.This is the moment an...
Share this story The video is short and very loud. A Boeing 737 is shaking itself half to pieces somewhere over northeastern Iran, and above the heads of the passengers the ceiling is coming apart — long panels of interior lining folding down out of the roofline and...
Share this story Look at the belly of the aircraft below. There is a cockpit on it. No glass, no pilot, no hole in the airframe. It is paint. A Royal Canadian Air Force CF-188 Hornet from below. The dark shape behind the radome is not a window. It is paint. Photo:...
Share this story On the night of 16 December 1943, Bomber Command came home to an England that had disappeared. Radiation fog had closed almost every airfield in the east. Crews who had survived Berlin circled above a white nothing until their tanks ran dry. At RAF...
Share this story On 6 September 1948, John Derry became the first Briton to fly faster than sound, in a de Havilland DH.108. Four years later to the day, on 6 September 1952, he was killed at Farnborough in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand people, along with his...
Share this story About six kilometres from McMurdo Station, under a shifting crust of snow on the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a Lockheed Super Constellation. It has been there since 8 October 1970. Nobody died in the accident that put it there, nobody ever came to take...
Share this story For two years, between 1956 and 1958, exactly one jet airliner was carrying fare-paying passengers anywhere in the world. The Comets were grounded. The 707 had not arrived. The Caravelle was not in service. The aircraft holding that title was a Soviet...
Share this story The United States Air Force has been trying to graduate 1,500 pilots a year for the better part of a decade. It has repeatedly said the number out loud, repeatedly built plans around it, and repeatedly missed it. On Sunday, Air Education and Training...
Share this story Ask an aviation enthusiast about Kampfgeschwader 200 and you will probably hear a version of the same story: that the Luftwaffe flew captured B-17 Flying Fortresses in American markings, slid them into USAAF bomber streams, and shot the formations...
Share this story The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum has the 1903 Wright Flyer. It has the Spirit of St. Louis, the Apollo 11 command module, a Concorde, a Space Shuttle and an SR-71 Blackbird. What it has never had, in all the years since the...
Share this story In commercial aviation, the customer almost never fires the airline. Shippers and carriers are bound together by long contracts, aircraft leases, crew bases and slot allocations, and the whole arrangement is built to survive bad weeks. Investigations...
Share this story On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon...
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