Buran: The Soviet Shuttle That Flew Once
On 15 November 1988, a spacecraft that looked almost exactly like the American Space Shuttle rose from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on a pillar of flame, circled the Earth twice, and landed itself on a runway in a 60 km/h crosswind — with no one aboard and no...
The Last Lap at Reno
For fifty-nine years, every September, the high desert north of Reno filled with a sound you felt in your chest before you heard it: the shriek of Merlin engines wound past their limits, warbirds built to kill fascism now screaming around pylons a few metres off the...
The Corner of the Sky That Kills Both Ways
There is a place in the sky where flying too slow will kill you and flying too fast will kill you — and the gap between the two can be narrower than the length of a bus. Pilots call it the coffin corner, and it is one of the strangest, most unforgiving pieces of...
Turn Them Into Bean Tins, Says Emirates
Ten Boeing 777-9s are sitting in Everett with nobody to fly them, and the man who ordered them has just suggested a use. Sir Tim Clark, president of Emirates Airline, told The Telegraph at Farnborough on Monday that his airline will not be taking the first batch of...
The $20,000 Rocket That Kills Drones
An AIM-120 AMRAAM costs about a million dollars. An AIM-9X Sidewinder costs around $450,000. A Shahed-type one-way attack drone costs perhaps $20,000 to $50,000, and Iran and its partners can build them faster than anyone can afford to shoot them down with...
The Biggest Order of the Day Had No Aircraft
Airshow order announcements are usually about aeroplanes. One of the largest deals of Farnborough’s opening day involved no aircraft at all. BOC Aviation, the Singapore-based lessor, signed for as many as 300 CFM LEAP engines — up to 200 LEAP-1A and 100 LEAP-1B....
The Dreamliner That Turned Around Over England
Two hours out of Rome, somewhere over the south-east of England, Alaska Airlines flight 181 turned around. The Boeing 787-9 had left Fiumicino at 15:45 on Sunday afternoon bound for Seattle, climbed to 34,000 feet and headed north-west across France. Then the track on...
Harare to Gatwick, Fourteen Years Later
In December 2011, an Air Zimbabwe Boeing 767 landed at London Gatwick and did not leave. It was impounded over unpaid debts, and with it went the last direct air link between Zimbabwe and the United Kingdom — a route the airline had flown since April 1980. On...
Riyadh Air Wants the Bigger Dreamliner
The first big order of Farnborough 2026 landed before most of the stands had finished setting up. Riyadh Air, the Saudi carrier that flew its first paying passenger barely three weeks ago, spent Monday morning committing to 34 more widebody aircraft across both Boeing...
What Is Flying at Farnborough This Week
The gates opened at Farnborough this morning. For the next five days a stretch of Hampshire tarmac becomes the place where the aerospace industry finds out what everyone else has been building, and where roughly a hundred thousand people stand in a field watching very...
Recent Comments