Before he built one of the world’s biggest cargo airlines, Fred Smith led a Marine rifle company in Vietnam and flew forward air control in the OV-10. Then, with FedEx nearly out of cash, he flew to Las Vegas. Here is the story, and what he said about it himself.
Operation Starvation, 1945: B-29s of the 313th Bomb Wing laid about 12,000 mines in Japanese waters, shutting the Shimonoseki Strait and sea lanes.
NOTAMs explained: what a Notice to Airmen is, how to decode the ICAO Q line, how TFRs work, the 2023 FAA outage and the Air Canada 759 near-miss.
Lilian Bland designed, built and flew the Mayfly in Ireland in 1910, fuelling it from a whisky bottle and an ear trumpet. Then her father offered a car.
Hélène Boucher beat the men over 1,000 km, hit 445 km/h in a Caudron racer in 1934 and was the first woman to lie in state at Les Invalides.
Raymonde de Laroche became the first woman to hold a pilot’s licence on 8 March 1910. Her crashes, the disputed Baroness title and her death.
Jean Mermoz flew the first air mail across the South Atlantic in 1930, survived the Sahara and the Andes, then vanished aboard the Croix-du-Sud in 1936.
The Fokker F27 Friendship: how a glued Dutch turboprop with Rolls-Royce Dart engines replaced the DC-3 and became Europe’s best-selling turboprop.
The BAC One-Eleven flew 18 months before the DC-9, sold to American Airlines, survived a deep-stall crash and was even built in Romania.
The F-106 Delta Dart was the USAF’s ultimate interceptor: SAGE-guided, Genie-armed, a Mach 2.31 record holder, then a drone and NASA lightning jet.
The Dassault Mystère IV: France’s first transonic fighter, paid for by the US, flown by the Patrouille de France and taken to war by Israel and India.
The Hawker Typhoon failed as an interceptor, then became the RAF’s rocket-firing ground-attack weapon in Normandy. Its flaws, Falaise and last survivor.
F-16 Next-Generation Mission Compute: the USAF holds an Industry Day to replace the 25-year-old mission computer on Block 40/42 and 50/52 F-16s.
The IAF’s Surya Kiran team flew about 18 manoeuvres in Hawk Mk132 jets at the Mysuru Dasara air show after rain cut short the first day.
Textron’s Citation Gen3 light jets, the CJ4, CJ3 and M2 Gen3, pass 1,220 flight-test hours toward FAA certification, all with Garmin Emergency Autoland.
The Gotha raids of 1917: how Germany’s England Squadron bombed London in daylight, killed 18 children in Poplar and led to the creation of the RAF.
The Taraia Object on Nikumaroro was likely a pile of large trees, not Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, the Purdue-backed expedition announced.