Decades before the V-22 Osprey, America built an aircraft that could lift off vertically like a helicopter, then cruise at over 400 mph like an airliner — by rotating its entire wing. It worked. It was decades ahead of its time. And almost nobody remembers it....
In the mid-1970s, two American planemakers built four extraordinary transport prototypes that could land almost anywhere and stop almost immediately. Both designs worked brilliantly. Both lost. And then one of them quietly went on to father one of the most successful...
The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of aviation's starkest lessons in a...
Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and utterly outclassed...
In June 1981, a young Israeli pilot flew the most exposed position in one of the most audacious air raids in history. Twenty-two years later, that same man carried a Torah scroll that had survived a concentration camp into orbit — and never came home. Between...
It was a routine training flight on a grey winter afternoon. Three American airmen took off from Wiesbaden in an unarmed little jet, expecting to be back in three hours. They never came home. The shootdown of a U.S. Air Force T-39 Sabreliner over East Germany on 28...
Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the theory was a dead end....
On the last day of 1986, a sleek new fighter lifted off from a runway in Israel and climbed into a clear desert sky. It handled beautifully. It was, by many accounts, world-class. Eight months later, its own government voted to kill it — by a single vote. The...
It looked like a beer barrel with wings, and the Swedes said so themselves — they called it Flygande Tunnan, the “Flying Barrel.” But behind that comical shape hid a serious pioneer: the first swept-wing fighter to enter squadron service anywhere in...
Line the Tupolev Tu-128 up next to the bombers it was built to shoot down, and you might struggle to tell the hunter from the prey. At nearly 30 metres long and around 43 tonnes, this Soviet interceptor was bigger and heavier than many of the aircraft it was meant to...
In 1997, the Russian government formally cancelled the fighter that was supposed to answer the American F-22. Three years later, in front of an invited crowd at Zhukovsky, that cancelled fighter took off anyway. The Mikoyan 1.44 is one of aviation's strangest...
The video is the kind that makes your stomach drop: a sleek business jet greasing its main wheels onto the runway, then holding its nose in the air for a few long seconds — because there was nothing underneath it to hold the nose up. On 18 August 2026, a NetJets...
For 13 years, if you wanted to fly nonstop from Melbourne to Seoul on Korean Air, you were out of luck. That changes this December. On 19 August 2026, Korean Air confirmed it will resume nonstop Seoul–Melbourne service — its first flights on the route...
On Tuesday, 18 August 2026, a very unusual crowd gathered in the sky over northern Poland and the Baltic — and every serious flight-tracker in Europe stopped to watch. In a large, U.S.-led NATO air exercise, a dense package of allied aircraft flew combat-strike,...
The Gulf's low-cost giant is about to do something low-cost carriers are not supposed to do: fly a narrowbody, non-stop, five and a half hours to the heart of Europe — every single day. On 19 August 2026, Air Arabia announced a new daily service between its...
A single photograph, and the internet decided China had built a mirror. Over the weekend of Aug. 19, 2026, fresh images of a PLA Navy J-35 carrier fighter in flight rocketed around military-watcher circles. Instead of the usual matte grey, the jet's skin caught the...
At 10,000 metres somewhere between Frankfurt and Rome, Jens Ritter reached up and switched on the internet. The gesture, aboard an Airbus A320neo named “November Mike,” marked the first Lufthansa passenger flight flying with Wi-Fi powered by Starlink...