Share this story In August 1929, most people had never been in an aeroplane, and nobody had flown around the world in anything as comfortable as a hotel. Then a silver airship 236 metres long drifted over Tokyo, then over the Pacific, then over Los Angeles, with a...
Share this story An American safety rule does not normally apply to a French or Dutch airline. Put a Delta flight number on the ticket, though, and it does. That is the lesson Air France and KLM have just paid $425,000 to learn, after the US Department of...
Share this story There are two numbers no airline pilot wants to say on the radio in the same breath: one landing gear leg that will not come down, and minutes of fuel left. On Sunday evening, 25 October, the crew of United Airlines flight 1854 dealt with both over...
Share this story Suppose you want to build an airliner. In the United States you file an application for a type certificate and the Federal Aviation Administration begins work. Your company needs no prior approval to exist as a designer; the FAA will, over the...
Share this story In August 2026 the Federal Aviation Administration published an Unapproved Parts Notification about cup holders. Not a spar fitting, not a fuel pump — cup holders, headset hangers, windshield shades and yoke grips, 3D-printed in a garage and...
Share this story Watch an SR-71 Blackbird leave the runway in full afterburner and the exhaust does something strange. The flame is not a smooth torch. It is a string of bright, evenly spaced beads, glowing knots strung out behind each nozzle like lights on a wire....
Share this story The fog is so thick that the crew of an airliner on final approach cannot see the ground, let alone the runway. Yet the jet is tracking a line through the murk with an accuracy measured in metres, descending along an invisible slope towards a...
Share this story More than three in four European airline pilots say they have nodded off at the controls at least once in the past month. That is the headline finding of a new report published on 26 October 2026 by the European Cockpit Association (ECA), the...
Share this story Helicopters own the piers of Lower Manhattan. On Monday morning, 26 October 2026, a small yellow airplane with ordinary fixed wings joined them. Electra flew its hybrid-electric EL2 demonstrator into Downtown Skyport, the heliport on the East River,...
Share this story Ask who certifies a new airliner in the United States and almost everybody answers: the FAA. It is a reasonable answer. For the overwhelming majority of the individual findings that add up to a certification, it is also wrong. The signature on most...
Share this story Open the American aircraft certification rules and search them for the word the whole replacement-parts industry argues about. Type OEM into 14 CFR Part 21, the part that governs how every aircraft, engine and component in the United States is...
Share this story On the morning of 1 May 1960, Francis Gary Powers was nearly four hours into a flight across the Soviet Union, cruising far above the reach of Soviet fighters, when he heard a dull thump. The aircraft lurched forward, there was a bright orange flash,...
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