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...
Alaska Airlines Just Started Flying a 737 to Reykjavik
The Boeing 737 MAX 8 is not the aircraft you would design for the North Atlantic. It is single-aisle, range-limited, and built around a route map that runs Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego, Phoenix. On 28 May 2026, Alaska Airlines is flying one to Reykjavik anyway —...
United Becomes the First US Airline to Fly to the Camino
The pilgrims have been arriving in Santiago de Compostela on foot for 1,200 years. On 27 May 2026, the first ones started arriving by Boeing 787-9 — direct from Newark, in seven and a half hours, no European hub in between. United Airlines is now the first US carrier...
Boeing Cranks the 737 MAX Line Back Up to 47 Jets a Month
The number is 47. That is how many 737 MAX airliners Boeing’s Renton, Washington factory is now permitted to roll off its assembly lines each month — a production rate the company has not been allowed to touch since the door plug blew out of Alaska Airlines...
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...
KLM Unveils 10 New Ultra-Long Routes — Including a 18h 45m Monster to Auckland
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has just unveiled its most ambitious network expansion of the decade: ten new ultra-long-haul routes from Amsterdam Schiphol, with first flights staggered between September 2026 and summer 2027. One of them — Amsterdam to Auckland via a...
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 lifted out of Jakarta on flight GA-820 to Jeddah, climbed to FL340, and headed northwest across the Indian Ocean. The flight plan was 4,200 nautical miles, roughly nine hours, with arrival in Jeddah just...
A Delta A330 Engine Fire Made the Cabin Go Dark — And the Pilots Got It Home
A loud bang, visible flashes from the left wing, and then the cabin went black. Passengers on Delta flight DL126 from Detroit to Paris later described the next ninety seconds as the worst of their lives — an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic with a smoking engine...
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 and, at current exchange rates, exceeds the combined annual profit of British Airways, Air France-KLM, and Lufthansa...
English
Recent Comments