Share this story Every modern aircraft carrier shares one strange feature: the landing runway is skewed off to one side, pointing away from the ship’s centreline. It looks like an afterthought. It is actually one of the most important safety inventions in...
Share this story The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of...
Share this story Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and...
Share this story Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the...
Share this story For 13 years, if you wanted to fly nonstop from Melbourne to Seoul on Korean Air, you were out of luck. That changes this December. On 19 August 2026, Korean Air confirmed it will resume nonstop Seoul–Melbourne service — its first flights...
Share this story Somewhere over Ukraine tonight, a lawnmower engine bolted to a warhead is droning toward a city. It is called a Shahed-136, Russia stamps out its own copies as the Geran-2, and it costs somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand dollars. The problem...
Share this story Imagine hanging in space, five miles up, strapped into a single-seat jet that is not flying. It is dangling. Above your canopy, filling the entire sky, is the underside of the largest bomber the world has ever built, six propellers and four jets of...
Share this story On 17 August 2026, in a New Delhi government building most people have never heard of, India signed a contract to rent two robotic aircraft for the price of a small skyscraper. The deal, worth about Rs 1,943 crore (roughly US$200 million), leases two...
Share this story A U.S. Air Force transport took off from New Zealand on Tuesday morning bound for Antarctica, flew south for more than an hour, and then did something aircrews almost never do on that route: it turned around and went home. The reason was not weather,...
Share this story Ask most people to picture “the world’s aircraft” and they imagine airliners — rows of jets at a busy airport. Yet airliners are a tiny slice of the real total. Add up everything with wings and an engine, from a two-seat trainer at a...
Share this story Most fast jets seat their crew one behind the other, the passenger staring at the back of the pilot’s helmet. The BAC Jet Provost and its armed cousin, the BAC Strikemaster, do it differently. In these aircraft you sit shoulder to shoulder with...
Share this story In the summer of 1991, the Royal Air Force flew supersonic Tornados, was preparing for the Eurofighter, and had just watched stealth aircraft debut over Iraq. And the aircraft it relied on to spot incoming threats and guard the northern approaches to...
Recent Comments