VietJet Will Fly Hanoi to Prague — With a Kazakh Pit Stop
VietJet Air just dropped a new line on the world’s long-haul map — and it runs straight from Hanoi to Prague. Starting 10 October 2026, the Vietnamese low-cost carrier will fly an Airbus A330 twice a week between Vietnam’s capital and the Czech Republic,...
Why a 1967 Thrust Reverser Is Still Flying in 2026
On the back of an early Boeing 737-200’s Pratt & Whitney JT8D engine, just behind the exhaust plug, are two big curved aluminium-honeycomb panels. In normal flight they wrap around the rear of the engine and look like the back end of the nacelle itself. On...
The Tu-134 That Landed on a Highway — for a 1974 Soviet Film
In Ulyanovsk on the Volga, in 1973, a Soviet-Italian film crew built a road. Not a real road for cars. A road-coloured runway, marked up with traffic paint, complete with painted Lada-grey lane lines and roadside signs in Cyrillic, all of it laid down across a reserve...
Bullet, Meet Rubber: How a Fuel Tank Seals Itself After Being Shot
A .30 calibre bullet hits a fuel tank at 800 metres per second. The aluminium skin punctures. A jet of avgas blows out under pressure, into the slipstream, towards a hot turbocharger exhaust. The aircraft, on most tanks built before 1939, is now thirty seconds from...
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...
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...
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...
What Actually Happens After a Mid-Air Collision: Inside the NTSB Investigation
When two aircraft collide in mid-air — as happened recently with an EA-18G Growler at Mountain Home Air Force Base — the debris field can stretch for miles. Pieces of aluminum, wiring, and avionics scatter across terrain in patterns that look random to the untrained...
The Strangest Things Found Inside Aircraft During Maintenance
Aircraft mechanics see things that the travelling public never hears about. Behind the polished cabin walls and beneath the gleaming fuselage panels lies a hidden world where forgotten sandwiches fossilize in inaccessible corners, wildlife takes up residence in...
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