Share this story In a close-in fight the old rule was brutally simple: to shoot at something, you had to point the aeroplane at it. The gunsight, and later the head-up display, sat fixed on the centreline, and everything a fighter pilot could kill had to be dragged...
Share this story The V-1 flying bomb carried a warhead of several hundred kilograms of high explosive and crossed the Channel at roughly the speed of a fast fighter. Shooting one down meant closing to gun range behind it and firing into a warhead that might detonate...
Share this story Delta has not flown to Monterey since 2008. From 19 December it will fly there twice a day from Los Angeles and once a day from Salt Lake City. The airline announced three new domestic routes on Friday, two of them serving a small coastal California...
Share this story Business jets do not usually change much. A new variant means a bit more range, a quieter cabin, a fresh avionics load. The aeroplane that Flexjet accepted on 18 September 2026 has something genuinely new in it: a 42-inch curved 4K OLED screen built...
Share this story Somewhere over the New Mexico desert this afternoon, a heavily modified Second World War fighter will round a fifty-foot pylon at something north of 450 mph, about as close to the ground as a sensible person parks a car. Today is the closing day of...
Share this story In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been...
Share this story Somewhere over Russia today, a man is lying on his stomach in the nose of a jet transport, looking straight down at the ground through a wall of flat glass panes, with nothing between him and the landscape but a few millimetres of window. He is a...
Share this story On Thursday in Moscow, Aeroflot signed for 90 more Yakovlev MC-21-310s. That takes the national carrier’s commitment to 108 aircraft, with deliveries running from 2029 to 2032, plus simulators, crew training and 22 years of support. The number of...
Share this story On the night of 20 September 1956, a 20-year-old aircraft mechanic at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona took an F-86F Sabre down the runway for a high-speed taxi test, felt the nose go light at 105 knots, decided he no longer had room to stop, and...
Share this story At half past nine on Thursday morning, an Airbus A380 that had not moved under its own power in nearly six years lined up at Tarbes-Lourdes-Pyrénées and went to Abu Dhabi. A6-APB was the last one. When it re-enters commercial service,...
Share this story On 1 January 2028 a rule comes into force that would have killed the Boeing 777 Freighter. Not by banning it from flying, and not by grounding a single existing aircraft. Simply by refusing to issue an airworthiness certificate to a new one. On 16...
Share this story The landing gear came off a Cessna 182. The seats came out of a P-51 Mustang. The actuators that swivelled the ducts were taken from a T-33. In February 1958 this assembly of other people’s parts hovered, then flew forwards, and in doing so...
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