Share this story A fighter lands, taxis clear, and stops. The canopy stays down. The pilot stays strapped in. The engine keeps running at idle while somebody walks a live fuel hose up to the aircraft and plugs it into a jet that is, by any normal safety standard, an...
Share this story Every few years an airline announces the world’s longest flight, collects the headlines, and then quietly kills it. Singapore Airlines did it twice. Air Canada is doing it right now with Vancouver to Singapore. Qantas is about to do the opposite...
Share this story On 22 September 1946 a four-engined Douglas DC-4 lifted off from Madrid and turned south. Thirty-six hours, three stops and one unscheduled diversion later it landed at Morón in Buenos Aires. Iberia had just become the first European airline to...
Share this story Put a Global Hawk and a Triton side by side and most people would call it the same aeroplane. Same enormous wing, same whale-shaped fuselage, same V-tail, same manufacturer. They are not the same aeroplane, and the difference comes down to one...
Share this story For twenty years, the way NATO moved something too big for its own aeroplanes was to ring a Ukrainian company and a Russian one. That sentence has aged badly, and the arrangement behind it is one of the stranger things the post-Cold-War world...
Share this story There is a category of object that can only travel by An-124. A satellite. A locomotive. A complete power station turbine. A Boeing 787 wing section. The rotor assembly for a wind farm. A concrete pump urgently required at a melting nuclear reactor....
Share this story You have heard the claim. The A-10’s gun is so powerful that firing it stops the aeroplane in mid-air. It does not. A burst costs the aircraft a few miles an hour in level flight. But the claim keeps circulating because the real numbers are almost as...
Share this story Air Canada launched Vancouver to Singapore in April 2024 with the language airlines use when they mean it: strategic expansion, preferred North American gateway to Asia, the only nonstop between the two countries. Two years and nine months later, it...
Share this story Qantas has been trying to fly from Sydney to New York without stopping for roughly as long as the route has existed. On Wednesday it put a date on it: mid-2028. The airline confirmed that Sydney to New York will be the second route in Project Sunrise,...
Share this story Continue for the runway. Four words, issued thousands of times a day at airports all over the United States, and on 15 September at Newark they put a 300-tonne airliner on an active runway that nobody had cleared it to enter. The aircraft was a...
Share this story Two of the most demanding jobs in aviation have hard age limits written into American law. One of them ends a career. The other one prevents a career from ever starting. An airline captain who is flying a perfect line check on the morning of their...
Share this story It is the question every fighter pilot gets asked at a dinner party, and the one the US Air Force spent five years and a public innovation competition trying to answer properly. How do you go to the toilet when you are strapped into an ejection seat,...
Recent Comments