Starlink Goes Live on the Emirates A380
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet is now flying on the world’s largest passenger aircraft. Emirates has installed the system on its first Airbus A380 superjumbo and is accelerating deployment across the fleet. For passengers accustomed to painfully slow...
Humanoid Robots Now Handle Bags at Tokyo Haneda
Japan Airlines has deployed humanoid robots at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport to handle baggage — the first time humanoid machines have worked alongside aircraft at any commercial airport in the world. The four-foot-tall robots, built by Chinese manufacturer Unitree...
Both Engines Shut Off: NTSB Data on China Eastern MU5735
Flight data recorder information released by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board confirms what many aviation investigators long suspected: someone in the cockpit of China Eastern Flight MU5735 deliberately shut off both engines before the aircraft plunged...
USS Nimitz Sails Into the Sunset After 51 Years
She’s older than most of her crew’s parents. USS Nimitz — the ship that defined the modern aircraft carrier, the vessel that spent five decades projecting American power from the Tonkin Gulf to the Persian Gulf to the Pacific — is making her final voyage....
Barrel Planes, Flying Pancakes, and Inflatable Wings: Aviation’s Strangest Aircraft
Aviation history is full of brilliant failures. Machines that looked like they were designed by a committee that never met, built by engineers who either knew something nobody else did — or had lost a very expensive bet. Some of these aircraft flew beautifully. Some...
Boom or Basket: Why the World Can’t Agree on Aerial Refueling
Somewhere over the Pacific, a B-52 bomber is drinking fuel from a flying gas station at 30,000 feet. A telescoping metal pipe — rigid, precise, operated by a human lying on their stomach looking out a window in the tanker’s belly — slots into a receptacle on the...
The Magic Jet the Air Force Wants to Kill
It looks like a business jet because it is one — a Bombardier Global 6000 in Air Force grey, orbiting quietly at 50,000 feet with no weapons, no sensors, and no missiles. But ask any soldier, Marine, or special operator who served in Afghanistan about the E-11A, and...
28,000 Cheap Cruise Missiles from Cargo Planes
Imagine a C-17 Globemaster — the workhorse cargo plane that usually hauls Humvees and MREs — opening its rear ramp at 25,000 feet and disgorging a stream of cruise missiles that fan out across the sky, each steering itself toward a separate target hundreds of miles...
The Lopsided Genius: Blohm & Voss BV 141
Look at a photograph of the Blohm & Voss BV 141 for the first time and your brain does something interesting. It tries to correct the image. It assumes the photo is cropped oddly, or that you are seeing the aircraft from an unusual angle, or that something has...
The Ryan XV-5 Vertifan: Jet Fans in the Wings
In the early 1960s, Ryan Aeronautical did something that sounded like a fever dream: they cut two large holes in the wings of a jet aircraft, installed massive fans inside them, and tried to make the whole thing hover like a helicopter. The truly astonishing part is...
English
Recent Comments