Share this story The de Havilland Comet was beautiful. Sleek, four-engined, impossibly quiet compared to the propliners it replaced. On 2 May 1952, BOAC Comet G-ALYP departed London for Johannesburg — the world’s first scheduled jet airline service. Passengers...
Share this story It is January 1921, and a crowd has gathered on the shore of Lago Maggiore near Sesto Calende. They are staring at a houseboat. Or a cathedral. Or perhaps a floating lumber yard that has sprouted wings — nine of them — and eight bellowing American...
Share this story Stand at any major airport in the world and watch the planes come and go. A Boeing 737 lands. An Airbus A320 takes off. A Dreamliner taxis past an A350. And unless you know exactly where to look — the nose shape, the winglet style, the engine...
Share this story When you hear the name Samsung, you think of smartphones, televisions, memory chips, and maybe washing machines. You probably do not think of the world’s largest production helicopter — a 56-tonne Soviet-designed behemoth with an eight-blade...
Share this story The model sat in a cavernous hangar in Seattle, gleaming under fluorescent lights like a promise made in aluminum. It was 1969, and Boeing had built a full-sized mockup of the 2707 — America’s supersonic transport, 306 feet long, with a drooped...
Share this story On a clear winter day in Italy’s Aosta Valley, a navy-blue L-39 Albatros taxied out beneath the snow-capped Alps with two of Germany’s most famous rappers strapped into its tandem cockpits. The cameras were rolling – and the footage...
Share this story Seven hours into an ocean crossing, the airline passenger in 34C has lost all feeling in one leg, finished the bad movie, and is staring down a queue for the lavatory. A few thousand feet away, an Air Force pilot is doing the same crossing strapped...
Share this story The wind off the Pyrenees carries a faint tang of jet fuel and cut aluminium across the apron at Tarbes–Lourdes. Under a hangar built specifically to swallow the biggest passenger jet ever made, a former Lufthansa Airbus A380 sits with its...
Share this story For more than five decades, Southwest Airlines grew the way a balloon inflates — relentlessly, in every direction, never quite stopping. Open seating, bags fly free, a single fleet type, and a map that only ever seemed to add dots. Retreat was...
Share this story It took the internet roughly ten minutes. On 19 May 2026, the National Transportation Safety Board opened its public docket on the crash of UPS Flight 2976 and, among thousands of pages, included a single PDF: a spectrogram, a visual graph of the...
In September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft in the world took to the skies over southwest England. The Bristol Brabazon was a colossus — its 230-foot wingspan exceeded that of a modern Boeing 747. It was powered by eight radial engines coupled in pairs to drive...
The Boeing 737 has been grounded, investigated, redesigned, and dragged through congressional hearings. Two MAX crashes killed 346 people. A door plug blew out mid-flight. The aircraft’s manufacturer agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge —...
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