Share this story Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points...
Share this story When Burt Rutan rolled his latest creation out at Oshkosh in 1996, the reaction from a crowd that worshipped him was more or less: what went wrong? The Boomerang looked broken. There was a small engine boom stuck to the left of the fuselage. The right...
Share this story It was meant to be an ordinary Saturday morning in southern Hungary. Instead, a light aircraft lifted off from the grass at Kalocsa with a man at the controls who had no business flying it, and pointed its nose toward the one place in the country...
Share this story In the mid-1930s, a French carpenter’s dream put aviation within reach of the ordinary man. Henri Mignet’s Flying Flea — the Pou-du-Ciel, or “Louse of the Sky” — was a tiny wooden aeroplane that anyone could build...
Share this story A Czech startup that has spent the better part of a decade quietly flying odd-looking prototypes just showed its hand. On 27 August 2026, Prague-based Zuri unveiled its first commercial product: an uncrewed cargo tiltrotor built to lift a couple of...
Share this story Three days after United rolled out ten new international destinations, American Airlines answered on August 27 with a transatlantic land-grab of its own: seven new international routes for summer 2027, three of them to cities American has never...
Share this story A Ryanair Boeing 737-800 on final approach to Cologne/Bonn came uncomfortably close to a drone earlier this year. This week, the consequences arrived: Germany’s air-navigation authority has rewritten how the airport’s runways are used...
Share this story On 6 August 1969, a Soviet helicopter lifted 40,204.5 kilograms — just over 40 tonnes — to a height of 2,255 metres. That is roughly the weight of a loaded articulated lorry, carried straight up by rotors. No helicopter has lifted more, before or...
Share this story At NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, a Rolls-Royce Pearl 15 — the engine that normally hangs on the back of a Bombardier Global business jet — was run on 100 percent hydrogen through a complete simulated flight cycle. Start-up,...
Share this story The trick she was best known for went like this: fly a biplane upside down, ten feet off the grass, and cut a ribbon strung between two poles with the propeller. The poles were held by Steve Wittman and Bill Brennan. On the first attempt the engine...
Share this story On 9 April 1960, over a 5,000 km closed circuit, a Soviet airliner averaged 877.21 km/h. That is 545 mph. It was carrying up to 25 tonnes of payload, it had four engines turning eight propellers, and the record it set has never been beaten by any...
Share this story The aeroplane was eleven years old and had been sitting around for a decade racking up about 990 hours under a string of previous owners. It was a 1953 Cessna 180 — a single-engine, tailwheel, four-seat lightplane of the sort that fills small-town...
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