How Half a Centimetre of Ice Destroyed the X-31
On 19 January 1995, a tiny piece of ice formed on the wrong piece of metal and destroyed one of the two aircraft at the heart of a pioneering German-American research programme. The piece of ice was perhaps half a centimetre across. The piece of metal it formed on was...
Convair R3Y Tradewind: The Turboprop Flying Boat the Navy Quietly Buried
For four short years in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Navy operated the strangest aerial-refuelling tanker it ever owned. It was a four-engined turboprop flying boat. It landed on water. It nose-loaded vehicles. It could refuel four jet fighters simultaneously from...
Edgley Optica: The Bug-Eye Observation Plane That Watched Everything
Most aircraft are designed around an engine. Some are designed around a payload. The Edgley EA-7 Optica is the only certified aircraft in aviation history designed around a view. Every other consideration — speed, range, payload, looks — was sacrificed so...
Bristol Brabazon: Britain’s Giant Airliner That Nobody Wanted
On 4 September 1949, the largest land-based aircraft ever built in Britain took off on its maiden flight from Filton, near Bristol. It had a wingspan of 70 metres — longer than a Boeing 747’s. Eight engines, buried in the wings in pairs, drove four sets of...
The Aeroberm Vertiport Could Finally Unlock Urban Air Taxis
Everyone making eVTOLs — Joby, Archer, Lilium’s ghost, Volocopter’s ghost, Eve, Vertical Aerospace — faces the same problem nobody wants to talk about: even if you successfully build the aircraft, where, exactly, does it land in a city? The...
A Garuda A330neo Just Spent 4.5 Hours Holding Off the Indian Coast
On the morning of 8 May 2026, a Garuda Indonesia A330-900neo — registration PK-GHI — lifted out of Jeddah on flight GA4208 to Medan, Indonesia, carrying Hajj pilgrims home. The routing crosses the Arabian Sea and southern India before dropping southeast...
China’s ‘Bohai Sea Monster’ Just Got Its Clearest Photos Yet
In the 1960s, American spy satellites scanning the Caspian Sea brought back pictures of something that should not have existed: a 92-metre, jet-powered hybrid of ship and aircraft, skimming the water at 500 km/h. The CIA called it the Caspian Sea Monster. The Soviets...
The 10 Most Beautiful Wings in the World
A wing is the most consequential geometry in nature. Whether it is the rachis-and-vane of a feather, the chitin-and-membrane of an insect, or the aluminium-and-composite of an aircraft, the same equation has to balance the same forces: lift against weight, thrust...
Birth of the Snake: How Bell Built the AH-1 Cobra in Eight Months
The Bell AH-1 Cobra is the most consequential helicopter design in American military history. Before the Cobra, every armed helicopter in the world was a transport airframe with weapons bolted onto it — a Huey with door guns, a Mi-4 with rocket pods, a Wessex with...
Qatar Airways Just Made a $1.94 Billion Profit and Bought 210 Boeing Jets
Qatar Airways finished its 2025/26 financial year with a net profit of US$1.94 billion. It is the highest annual profit in the airline’s history. The carrier moved 41.8 million passengers, 1.43 million tons of cargo, and a 12% share of the entire global air...
English
Recent Comments