The Caspian Sea Monster That Spooked the CIA
In the late 1960s, a CIA analyst sat staring at a grainy satellite photograph of the Caspian Sea and could not make the numbers work. The machine in the frame was nearly 100 metres long — longer than a Boeing 747 — yet it was clearly skimming the water,...
The Jet That Took Off Hanging From a Hook
Picture a flatbed trailer tilting slowly skyward in the California desert until it stands almost vertical, and clinging to it nose-up like a wasp on a windowpane, a stubby silver dart of an aircraft. There is no runway in sight. There is no landing gear worth the...
China’s Cargo Drone Just Flew Itself
On a grey morning in Pucheng, in China’s Shaanxi province, a chunky white-and-blue aircraft with two propellers and a twin-boom tail rolled down the runway, lifted off, and flew a full 22-minute circuit — climb, manoeuvre, approach and landing. Nothing...
Hornet Down: Marine Jet Crashes, Sparks Wildfire
Just after noon on June 13, 2026, residents around Rimrock Lake heard the kind of sound that doesn’t belong over a quiet stretch of the Washington Cascades: a fighter jet, low and fast, then a series of sharp pops. Seconds later a U.S. Marine Corps F/A-18D Hornet...
Amazon’s Delivery Drones Just Left the US
In a back garden in Darlington, a 40-kilo aircraft drops out of the County Durham sky, hovers about four metres up, releases a shoebox-sized parcel onto the lawn, and climbs away again. No van. No driver. No knock on the door. Just a tube of mascara, or a phone cable,...
The $9 Billion Jet That Never Flew a Passenger
It flew. That is the strangest, most expensive part of the whole story. The Mitsubishi SpaceJet was not a paper aeroplane or a CGI fantasy that died on a designer’s screen. It rolled out, it taxied, it rotated off the runway at Nagoya, and it climbed into a...
Philippine Airlines Puts Its A350-1000 on the Manila–Toronto Marathon
Philippine Airlines has just made one of the world’s longest commercial hops a little fresher. As of 5 June 2026, the flag carrier is flying its brand-new Airbus A350-1000 nonstop between Manila and Toronto — a roughly 13,200 km marathon that now becomes...
Qatar Airways Is Coming Back to Philadelphia
Qatar Airways is heading back to the City of Brotherly Love. The Gulf carrier confirmed in June 2026 that it will relaunch daily nonstop service between its Doha hub and Philadelphia on 1 August 2026 — reclaiming a US East Coast gateway it abandoned in 2023, and...
The Fighter With Its Wings On Backwards
Picture a desert morning at Edwards in 1949: dust, sagebrush, and a fighter that looks like someone bolted the wings on the wrong way round. Most aircraft wings are fat where they meet the fuselage and slim to a graceful point at the tip. The Republic XF-91...
South Korea Reveals an Air-Launched Hypersonic Ship-Killer
South Korea just put the world on notice. In a slickly produced video released in February 2026, defence and rail group Hyundai Rotem revealed a concept for an air-launched hypersonic anti-ship cruise missile, built on the same scramjet technology that powers the...
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