Share this story Nearly everyone was aboard. A hundred and eighty-eight people were flying home to Brussels from the Bulgarian coast, boarding was almost finished, and the last busload of passengers was being driven out to the aircraft. The bus touched the wing. Not...
Share this story Every airline maintenance manager on earth felt a small twinge of recognition on Tuesday afternoon. An emergency escape slide inflated on the ground, with nobody evacuating, because somebody moved a door handle in the wrong sequence. It is one of the...
Share this story The Netherlands is buying one aeroplane. That sounds like a rounding error in a defence budget, and it is arguably the most interesting procurement decision in European air power this month. On 10 September 2026, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and Saab...
Share this story The photograph looks like an accident in progress. Two columns of black smoke stand on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base, thick enough to swallow an eight-engined bomber whole, and out of the murk a third B-52 Stratofortress is coming, wings...
Share this story Every delta-winged aircraft America built in the 1950s and 1960s owes something to one prototype that only one pilot ever had a good word for, and he did not really. The Convair XF-92A flew 118 times over five years, was rebuilt around three different...
Share this story The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the...
Share this story At 15:55 this afternoon, a Boeing 787-9 in a deep indigo livery touched down at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and an hour and a half later it went back the way it came. Flight RX0873 from Riyadh, inbound. RX0874 to Riyadh, outbound. Every day...
Share this story The NH90 has one of the worst reputations in modern military aviation. Australia binned its 46 of them a decade early. Norway walked away. Sweden is phasing its out by 2027. Belgium and Finland are not fans. The type has become shorthand for a...
Share this story In 1954 the Air Ministry wrote a requirement that no aircraft on earth could meet. OR.330 asked for a machine that would cruise at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet, be capable of Mach 3, fly 5,754 miles, and penetrate Soviet airspace and come home. Avro won...
Share this story At about twenty to two on the morning of 28 November 1979, someone in Air New Zealand’s navigation section changed two numbers in a computer. The McMurdo waypoint stored in the ground system moved roughly two degrees and fifteen minutes of...
Share this story There is an airline that flies the Atlantic with no economy cabin at all. No premium economy either. Seventy-six seats, all of them business, all of them lying flat. La Compagnie has been doing this since 2014, mostly out of Paris, and on Monday it...
Share this story Two Queensland companies signed an agreement at Parliament House in Canberra on Monday that, on paper, is unremarkable: a rocket firm and a scramjet firm agreeing to work together. What they are actually proposing is a business almost nobody offers....
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