Share this story “Why am I seeing sky all of a sudden?” That was the thought in the co-pilot’s head, he later told investigators, a second or two after his captain called “go around” on a bounced landing at London Heathrow. By then the...
Share this story Ask a hundred passengers what a jet engine is designed to do when it swallows a large bird, and ninety-nine will say: keep running. It is a reasonable assumption. It is also wrong, and the regulation says so in plain English. Under 14 CFR 33.76, the...
Share this story Shortly before sunset on 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727 began to move at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport in Luanda, Angola. There was no call to the tower. It manoeuvred erratically, entered a runway without clearance and, with its lights off and its...
Share this story Every new aeroplane, engine and propeller certificated in the United States arrives with a stack of maintenance instructions written by its manufacturer. Thousands of pages of servicing data, troubleshooting trees, torque values and inspection...
Share this story Sometime around 1978, a silver Soviet bomber with a red star on its tail swept low past the American destroyer USS Hewitt, close enough for a Navy photographer to fill the frame with it. Scenes like that were routine for three decades. Wherever the US...
Share this story Next time you walk past an airliner engine on the stand, look past the fan blades at the wall of the intake. That smooth grey surface is not smooth at all. Up close it is peppered with thousands of tiny holes, as regular as the perforations on a sheet...
Share this story On 21 October 1937, NKVD officers arrested Vladimir Petlyakov, one of the Soviet Union’s best aircraft engineers, along with Andrei Tupolev and the leadership of the TsAGI institute. The charges of sabotage and espionage were invented. Many of...
Share this story A B-52 lifts off from Minot in North Dakota, a Minuteman III sits in a silo somewhere under the Great Plains, and an Ohio-class submarine cruises silently at an undisclosed point in the ocean. Together they form the United States nuclear triad: three...
Share this story At 18:48 German time on 7 September 1940, a Luftwaffe camera caught one of the defining images of the Second World War: a lone Heinkel He 111 drifting over Wapping, its shadow-black wings laid across the bend of the Thames and the docks of East...
Share this story Shortly before noon on Tuesday 10 November, a two-seat jet trainer touched down at Gangshan Air Force Base in southern Taiwan and kept going. Its brakes had failed. One main-wheel tyre burst, the jet veered off the runway and its main landing gear was...
Share this story At 19:20 on 21 September 2017, two minutes before the end of civil twilight, a United States Army UH-60M Black Hawk was flying at about 300 feet over the water near Hoffman Island, off Staten Island. It was the lead aircraft of a flight of two, on a...
Share this story On the morning of 29 March 2016, EgyptAir flight MS181, an Airbus A320 on the short domestic hop from Alexandria’s Borg El Arab airport to Cairo, turned north instead and landed at Larnaca in Cyprus. A passenger had told the crew he was wearing...
Recent Comments