Share this story A sixty-six-year-old captain walks out to an Air New Zealand jet in Auckland, flies a domestic sector, and goes home. Entirely legal. Put the same captain on a service to Los Angeles and the flight cannot depart. There is no single retirement age for...
Share this story On the second night of the war in Afghanistan, a B-2 Spirit lifted off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, flew west across the Pacific, bombed targets in Afghanistan, and landed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Its two pilots had been...
Share this story Radar does one simple thing extremely fast. It shouts into the dark, listens for an echo, and times how long the echo took to come back. Everything else is refinement. The shout is a pulse of radio energy. The echo is a vanishingly small fraction of...
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,...
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