Share this story Every airline take-off has a moment when the pilot’s choice disappears. Before it, a crew that sees a fire warning or loses an engine can pull the thrust levers back and stop on the runway. After it, the same crew must keep going and take the...
Share this story Twelve years after Air Algérie flight 5017 fell out of the sky over northern Mali, a French court has named someone responsible. On 28 September 2026, the Paris Criminal Court found Spanish charter airline Swiftair guilty of involuntary manslaughter...
Share this story Boeing looked close to certifying its biggest 737. Then a software problem got in the way. On Monday, 28 September, FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the agency would hold off on certifying the 737 MAX 10 until it understands a newly disclosed...
Share this story Munich’s runways are 4,000 metres long. On 15 August 2026, a fully loaded Vietnam Airlines Boeing 787-9 used all of it, and then some. Flight VN34 to Hanoi left the ground from the grass beyond the end of the runway, clipped the approach lights...
Share this story Business jets are built to be quiet, smooth and economical. So a photograph of a Dassault Falcon 20 with a long cone of flame blasting out of one engine looks like a joke or a Photoshop. It is neither. In the late 1980s one Falcon 20, registered...
Share this story Ask why airliners cruise at about 40,000 feet and you get one of two answers. The aerodynamic one: they are pressed up against the coffin corner, where the stall and the speed of sound close in from both sides. The regulatory one: flight level 410 is...
Share this story In the summer of 1976 a sound arrived on the shortwave bands that nobody had asked for. It was a hard, flat tapping, roughly ten beats a second, and it walked. One week it sat on top of an amateur band, the next it was parked across an aeronautical...
Share this story On the morning of 11 September 1962, the President of the United States stepped off his aircraft at the Redstone Arsenal airfield in Huntsville, Alabama, and shook hands with the man who had built Hitler’s V-2. Wernher von Braun, now director of...
Share this story In early 1942, a woman in Washington, D.C. commuted to her office in Baltimore every day in her own aeroplane. Her husband mentioned it to his boss, Colonel William H. Tunner, who was scouring the country for pilots to deliver new aircraft from...
Share this story At 5:17 in the morning of 8 May 1927, a white biplane staggered off the grass at Le Bourget, so heavy with fuel that it barely cleared the trees at the end of the field. In the open cockpit sat two of France’s great airmen: Charles Nungesser,...
Share this story On Sunday a FedEx Boeing 777F landed in Atlanta carrying nothing but two giant pandas, their bamboo and their keepers. It made headlines, but it was not unusual. Every year airlines and air forces move racehorses, zoo animals, livestock and even...
Share this story Nine red jets pull up in front of the crowd, and on a word from the leader, “Smoke on, go,” thick white trails pour from their tails. Seconds later, red and blue join the white, and the Union Flag is painted across the sky. Display smoke...
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