Share this story It was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday. Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 lifted off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on the morning of 17 April 2018, bound for Dallas with 149 people aboard. First Officer Darren Ellisor was flying the leg; in...
Share this story On the morning of 27 March 1977, neither KLM Flight 4805 nor Pan Am Flight 1736 was meant to be anywhere near Tenerife. Both Boeing 747s were bound for Gran Canaria when a bomb planted by a separatist group tore through the terminal at Las Palmas....
Share this story In the autumn of 1940, a young man from Iowa or California or Brooklyn would stand at a Canadian train station with a suitcase and a lie ready on his lips. He was not, officially, going to war. His government had made that illegal. Joining the armed...
Share this story On a sun-baked runway in north-eastern Thailand, two very different ideas of a modern fighter are parked wingtip to wingtip. On one side, China’s J-10C — the same delta-winged jet that Pakistan says it flew against Indian Rafales in 2025....
Share this story On a freezing April night in 1978, a South Korean airliner full of sleeping passengers wandered a thousand miles off course, over one of the most secret corners of the Soviet Union, and was hit by an air-to-air missile. What happened next is one of...
Share this story Just after dawn on October 25, 1944, lookouts on a cluster of small American ships off the island of Samar saw something that should not have been there: pagoda masts on the horizon. The most powerful surface fleet Japan could still put to sea —...
Share this story The image is almost too strange to be true: the President of the United States, having boarded Air Force One in front of the world’s cameras, quietly slipping back off the jet and into an airport catering truck — then flying home on a different...
Share this story Twenty years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set foot on the summit of Mount Everest, two men in open-cockpit biplanes looked down on it from above. On April 3, 1933, a small British expedition did something that sounds impossible for the...
Share this story Twenty-one years ago today, on August 14, 2005, a Boeing 737 crossed the sky over Greece with everyone aboard already beyond saving. It flew straight and level, obedient to its autopilot, holding its assigned altitude and following its route as if...
Share this story Most heads of government inspect their air force from a podium, or at most from the tarmac. On August 14, 2026, Thailand’s prime minister planned to do it from the cockpit. Anutin Charnvirakul was scheduled to fly in a Royal Thai Air Force F-16...
Share this story On the ground it gleamed like cutlery. Long, thin and unpainted, its polished skin caught the Filton light, and its shape earned it a nickname that stuck for life: the Flaming Pencil. The Bristol 188 was Britain’s bold, doomed attempt to fly...
Share this story Every pilot who trained on it remembers the sound before the shape. Long before you saw the stubby little jet taxi out, you heard it: a shriek so piercing it seemed to drill straight through your skull. Ground crews had a name for the Cessna T-37 that...
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