What Actually Happens Inside a Wind Tunnel
Every aircraft you have ever seen in the sky was first tested in a room where nothing flies at all. Wind tunnels are, conceptually, the simplest tools in aerospace engineering: take a tube, put air in one end, put a model in the middle, and measure what happens. In...
The Bent Wingtips That Save Billions in Fuel
Sit in a window seat over the wing of almost any modern airliner and you will see it: the wingtip, instead of ending in a clean point, bends sharply upward into a fin. It looks like a small design flourish. It is not. That upturned tip is quietly one of the most...
Air Canada Bets Big on a Smaller Jet
On the first morning of June, an Air Canada jet pushed back at Montreal and pointed its nose at Nantes, a tidy French city on the Loire that no Canadian airline had ever served nonstop. Two days later, a widebody lifted off from Toronto bound for Shanghai for the...
A Czech Trainer Just Joined the Wright Flyer
A small white jet with a chequered flag down its flank taxied to a stop outside the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center on a bright Saturday in June, and a 9-year-old’s dream from 1962 finally landed. The pilot who climbed down was Ed Noel. The aircraft was...
China Eastern Bets $9 Billion on Airbus
On a Friday afternoon in Shanghai, executives from China Eastern Airlines and Airbus signed their names to a document that quietly reshapes the balance of power in the world’s most fought-over aviation market. The deal: 25 brand-new Airbus A330-900neo widebodies, with...
The Plane So Ugly It Ended Up in Mad Max
There are ugly aeroplanes, and then there is the Transavia Airtruk. It looks like a garden shed, a greenhouse and a barn door got into an argument and were forced to fly home together. It is so otherworldly that the filmmakers behind Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome cast it...
He Pedaled a Plane Across the Channel
Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence over the water has...
Cathay Opens a New Door to Central Asia
Try, today, to fly from Hong Kong to Almaty. You can’t — not directly. You go the long way, connecting through the Gulf, or Istanbul, or Moscow, turning a regional hop into a day-long ordeal. From early 2027, that finally changes. Cathay Pacific has...
300 Feet From Disaster at Boston Logan
A football field is 300 feet long. On the morning of 20 June 2026, that was roughly the margin between an ordinary Saturday at Boston Logan and a disaster the whole country would still be talking about. Delta Flight 2351, an Airbus A319 in from Dallas with 135 people...
Toronto to Shanghai, Nonstop Once More
There was applause at the gate. On 3 June 2026, as Air Canada flight AC27 pushed back from Toronto Pearson bound for Shanghai, staff and travellers marked the moment with the kind of small ceremony airlines reserve for something that actually matters. A flight had...
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