Bomb Threat on a Plane: What Pilots and Crews Actually Do
Share this story On Sunday night, an Austrian Airlines A320 flying from Tel Aviv to Vienna received a bomb threat, diverted to Sofia under a Bulgarian MiG-29 escort, and landed safely. Nothing was found. That is how almost all of these end. But the crew could not know...
R34 Airship: The First Return Flight Across the Atlantic, 1919
Share this story In the small hours of 2 July 1919, at East Fortune in Scotland, the order came to walk her out. Ground crews hauled a 643-foot hydrogen airship out of its shed into a cold, misty north-easterly wind. On board were around 30 men, a kitten called...
Lufthansa A340-600 Retires: D-AIHW Flies the Final LH419
Share this story At Frankfurt on Monday morning, a very long white airliner rolled out on the runway, slowed, and turned off for the last time with passengers aboard. Lufthansa flight LH419 from Washington Dulles had landed on schedule after eight hours and five...
Carrier Strike Group Explained: What Sails With an Aircraft Carrier
Share this story On Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026, families waved from Portsmouth’s Round Tower as HMS Prince of Wales slipped out to sea for the second phase of Operation Firecrest. She sails to take charge of the UK Carrier Strike Group in the North...
Airspeed AS.39 Fleet Shadower: Britain’s Four-Engined Night Stalker
Share this story Picture a moonless night in the North Sea. Somewhere below, an enemy battle squadron is steaming hard, blacked out. Above it, at little more than 40 knots, a strange four-engined monoplane drifts along at 1,500 feet, its crew peering into the dark and...
Fume Events Explained: What That Cabin Smell Really Means
Share this story The boarding music is still playing when it drifts down the aisle: a stale, cheesy, slightly chemical smell. Crews have a name for it. They call it “dirty socks”, sometimes “wet dog”. Most passengers wrinkle their noses and...
EAA Aviation Museum Adds Six Aircraft, From Seattle II to a PBY
Share this story A flying boat that sank U-boats off Iceland. A homebuilt biplane that took one Washington State couple more than a decade. A powered hang glider that lifted off a frozen Wisconsin lake in 1975 and started a movement. They now share a roof in Oshkosh....
FAA 1,500-Hour Rule: How US Airline Pilots Actually Get Hired
Share this story Ask anyone in American aviation how you get hired by an airline and you will be given a number. Fifteen hundred hours. It is the single best-known figure in the industry, it is quoted as though it were a law of physics, and almost every part of it is...
FAR Part 103: The Aircraft You Can Fly With No License
Share this story Almost everything that flies in the United States is wrapped in paperwork. A certificate for the pilot. A medical for the pilot. A registration for the aeroplane. An airworthiness certificate for the aeroplane, and an annual inspection to keep it....
Short Sperrin: Britain’s Insurance-Policy Nuclear Bomber
Share this story Everyone remembers Britain’s three V-bombers: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan and the Handley Page Victor. Almost nobody remembers the fourth. It had straight wings, engines stacked one on top of the other, and a job description that...
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