Share this story Vincent Burnelli spent nearly fifty years arguing that the fuselage of an aeroplane should not be a tube. It should be a wing. He built aircraft that proved it worked. He never sold one in quantity. One survives, sitting outdoors in Connecticut, and...
Share this story On 18 November 1947 a test pilot took off from San Diego in a car with an aeroplane bolted to the roof, and discovered somewhere over the mud flats that he had almost no aviation fuel on board. He had checked the fuel gauge before departure. It was...
Share this story An airliner fuselage contains something in the order of a million rivets. Each one is a hole drilled through the skin, which is to say a stress concentration deliberately introduced into a pressure vessel, repeated a million times. A welded fuselage...
Share this story Airlines are not short of passengers. They are short of cheap fuel, and the first thing that breaks is the flight that was only ever marginally worth operating. At the Morgan Stanley Laguna Conference on 16 September, American Airlines chief executive...
Share this story Lufthansa has spent forty years as one of the most reliably Airbus-shaped airlines in Europe. On Wednesday evening its supervisory board signed off on twenty more Boeings — and specifically on the biggest 737 ever built. The Lufthansa Group is...
Share this story On 31 December 1966 the Federal Aviation Administration chose which American company would build the aeroplane that was going to make Concorde obsolete. Lockheed lost. The reasons given were, in effect, that its aircraft was too sensible. The L-2000...
Share this story The decision that saved El Al Flight 219 was not the dive. It was made on the ground at Schiphol, before anyone boarded, and it nearly cost the captain his career. On 6 September 1970 a Boeing 707 left Amsterdam for New York with 138 passengers and 10...
Share this story Hawker Aircraft built the Hurricane, the Typhoon, the Tempest, the Hunter and the Harrier. The name is stamped on some of the most important aeroplanes Britain ever produced. It is not the name of a British aristocrat or an engineer knighted for it....
Share this story The Boeing 737 MAX spent almost two years grounded worldwide after two crashes killed everybody on board both aircraft. Its reputation has never entirely recovered, whatever the safety record since. The United States Air Force is going to buy one, and...
Share this story There were several news helicopters over Chatsworth on the evening of 15 September. A Metro bus and an SUV had collided in the west San Fernando Valley and people had died, so the aircraft that cover Los Angeles from above had gathered, as they do....
Share this story Russian-registered aircraft have been banned from European Union airspace since 2022. On the morning of 16 September, one landed in Germany anyway, with permission, and with the German foreign ministry explaining why. At 09:36 an Ilyushin Il-96-300 in...
Share this story For years the argument about the world’s best-connected airport was really an argument between Heathrow, Schiphol and Frankfurt, with Dubai lurking. On 16 September that stopped being true. OAG published Megahubs 2026 and Istanbul is first. Not...
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