Share this story Head-on, the Fairey Gannet looked like something a committee had argued about and lost. A deep, humpbacked fuselage, a chin full of radar, and a nose crowded with eight spinning propeller blades stacked in two counter-rotating discs. It is one of the...
Share this story From the front it looked like the future: a big, twin-boom jet with a needle nose and no visible cockpit canopy where you would expect one. The de Havilland Sea Vixen was one of the most futuristic fighters the Royal Navy ever flew. It was also one of...
Share this story In the 1950s the U.S. Navy watched the Air Force build a fleet of long-range bombers to carry the nation’s nuclear deterrent — and decided it wanted in. Its answer was one of the strangest and most beautiful warplanes America ever built: a...
Share this story On 24 July, a rule two decades in the making rewrote what counts as a light-sport aircraft in America — and, with it, what a beginner pilot is allowed to fly. MOSAIC, the Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification, tears up the...
Share this story For four years a quiet turf war has run between the companies building 5G networks and the people who land airplanes. On 24 July, the FAA moved to end it. The agency is issuing a final rule requiring aircraft radio altimeters to shrug off interference...
Share this story In 1943, a 33-year-old engineer promised the US Army Air Forces a jet fighter in 180 days. He rented a circus tent, pitched it beside a foul-smelling plastics factory in Burbank, sealed off a handful of hand-picked engineers, and delivered the XP-80...
Share this story It shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the First World War — and it killed a horrifying number of the young men sent up to fly it, before they ever met a German. The Sopwith Camel was the finest dogfighter of 1917 and...
Share this story It was not fast. It was not pretty. It could not dogfight. And for thirty years, when the weather closed in and the target sat hidden under cloud and darkness that grounded everything else, the US Navy sent the Grumman A-6 Intruder. Subsonic,...
Share this story Archer Aviation spent years promising to fly you across a city in a whisper-quiet electric air taxi. At Farnborough this week it revealed something rather different: a pilotless, hybrid-electric tiltrotor built with the defence-technology firm...
Share this story On the morning of 1 April 2001, a lumbering American spy plane and a hot-rod Chinese fighter touched wingtips over the South China Sea. One aircraft limped away with its nose torn off and 24 terrified people aboard. The other broke in half and fell...
Share this story There is a place in the sky where flying too slow will kill you and flying too fast will kill you — and the gap between the two can be narrower than the length of a bus. Pilots call it the coffin corner, and it is one of the strangest, most...
Share this story Every couple of years, the aviation industry decamps to a former airfield in Hampshire and spends a week trying to out-announce itself. Farnborough 2026 is no exception — and by the close of the second day, the scoreboard had already ticked past...
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