Lufthansa’s 10-and-10 Widebody Bet — and Why the Split Matters
The Lufthansa Group supervisory board signed off on the 20-widebody order two weeks ago — ten Airbus A350-900s and ten Boeing 787-9s, $7.7 billion at list, deliveries 2032 through 2034. The headline numbers have been digested. What deserves a second look is the...
Wiley Post: The One-Eyed Roughneck Who Flew Solo Around the World First
The cockpit of the Winnie Mae, in the summer of 1933, smelled like a hardware store on fire. Hot castor oil, cold steel, the eye-watering tang of leaded fuel sweating through the wooden wing root. There was no autopilot worth the name. There was no second pilot,...
airBaltic Has Until 30 June, or It Dies
There are airlines that fail dramatically — engines unspooling on the apron, court bailiffs at the gate, headlines about stranded passengers. And then there are airlines that fail the way airBaltic might fail: quietly, through a spreadsheet, on a particular Friday at...
China Just Handed Boeing a 200-Jet Lifeline
For nearly a decade Boeing has been doing the corporate equivalent of staring at China through a chain-link fence. Tariffs, the 737 MAX grounding, the trade war, a pandemic, more tariffs — name a thing that could keep a US planemaker out of the world’s biggest...
Oregon Will Let Tillamook’s Historic WWII Hangar B Rot
One of the largest wooden structures in the world will not be repaired. The Port of Tillamook Bay Board of Commissioners in Oregon voted this week against funding the restoration of Hangar B — a 1943 wartime Navy blimp hangar 300 metres long, 90 metres wide, and 60...
The First Star Trek ‘Enterprise’ Model Is Finally Authenticated
For nearly fifty years it sat in someone’s storage closet — a small, plywood, surprisingly fragile model of an interstellar starship. This week, the original 33-centimetre prototype of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701 from the original 1965 Star Trek pilot has been...
The FAA Made a Public Tracker for Its $12.5 Billion ATC Overhaul
For the first time in its history, the Federal Aviation Administration is letting US taxpayers watch one of its biggest projects unfold in real time. The agency just launched a public dashboard tracking the $12.5 billion Modern Skies air-traffic-control modernisation...
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,...
The Cri-Cri: France’s Lawnmower-Powered Aerobatic Twin
The pilot puts on a Bell helmet, climbs into a cockpit narrower than a kitchen drawer, and starts two engines whose combined output would not run a small lawnmower at full noise. The whole aircraft, fully fuelled and with him in it, weighs 174 kilograms. The wingspan...
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...
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