Share this story A helicopter hovering 200 feet above a field looks like the safest thing in the sky. It is going nowhere, slowly. But if its single engine stops at that moment, the pilot is in one of the worst places a helicopter can be: too high to simply drop onto...
Share this story It was meant to be a birthday treat: a short helicopter ride over the farmland of Quebec’s Montérégie region on a Saturday afternoon. Shortly after take-off on 26 September, the helicopter came down in a field in...
Share this story The cargo manifest was short. Two giant pandas, some fresh bamboo, water, a few favourite treats and their keepers from Zoo Atlanta. That was the entire load on a FedEx Boeing 777F that took off from Chengdu in the small hours of Sunday 27 September...
Share this story The first approach into Bengaluru did not work out, so the crew of IndiGo flight 6E 6542 went around. On the second attempt, in gusty winds on Sunday 27 September, the tail of their Airbus A321 touched the runway. The jet landed safely and everyone...
Share this story Manchester does not get many jumbo jets any more. On Saturday afternoon, 26 September, it got one it had not planned for, and by Sunday there were two of them parked side by side on the ramp. Lufthansa flight LH470 from Frankfurt to Toronto was...
Share this story Two hours out of Barcelona, somewhere west of the Iberian coast, the cabin of Delta Air Lines flight DL251 began to fill with smoke. The Airbus A330-300 was bound for Boston with 296 passengers on board. Instead of pressing on across the Atlantic, the...
Share this story A four-engined turboprop lurches, drops and shudders through a wall of grey. Rain hammers the windscreen, the instruments blur, and the flight engineer in the middle seat works the power levers. Then, suddenly, the cockpit fills with light: blue sky...
Share this story Most wind tunnels test models. For most of the 20th century, American aeronautical engineers had two tunnels big enough to swallow the real thing: a propeller-driven hangar at Langley, Virginia, and an even larger one at Moffett Field in California....
Share this story Twice an hour, for three minutes, the North Atlantic fell silent. At a quarter past and a quarter to, every wireless operator on every ship within reach of 500 kilohertz stopped transmitting, pressed his headphones a little harder against his ears,...
Share this story On the evening of 17 March 1970, Eastern Air Lines Shuttle Flight 1320 left Newark for Boston with 68 passengers and five crew. The Shuttle worked like a bus: no reservations, no security check, and you paid your fare on board once the aircraft was in...
Share this story Walk around any aircraft parked on a ramp and you will see them fluttering in the breeze: long red ribbons printed with three words in white capitals. REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT. They hang from pitot tubes, landing gear, engine intakes and ejection seats,...
Share this story Open a flight-tracking app on almost any day and look at the Black Sea or the Baltic. Among the airliners you will often find something that does not belong: a four-engined jet flying long racetrack patterns off a coastline, or a drone orbiting at...
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