The Jet With Its Wings on Backwards

The Jet With Its Wings on Backwards

Roll the X-29 onto its back and the wings look wrong. Not damaged, not folded for storage — just backwards. Where every other jet on the ramp sweeps its wings rearward like an arrowhead, the X-29 sweeps them forward, the tips reaching out ahead of the roots as...
The Aircraft That Had No Wings

The Aircraft That Had No Wings

It is the morning of 18 September 1972, on a Dornier test field beside Lake Constance. There is no cockpit to climb into, no pilot to brief. The machine on the apron looks less like an aircraft than a fat steel cigar laid on its side: a smooth cylindrical body roughly...
Air Canada Bets Big on a Smaller Jet

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...
Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145

Airbus Pulls the Pilot from the H145

Walk the static line at ILA Berlin and you expect the usual choreography around a helicopter: a pilot strapping in, a crew chief signalling, the slow whine of an Arriel engine spooling up. This June, Airbus parked something stranger under the Brandenburg sun. The...
Marines Take Six F-35s With No Radar

Marines Take Six F-35s With No Radar

The most expensive fighter program in history just handed the U.S. Marine Corps six brand-new stealth jets that cannot see. In place of their radar, each F-35B carries a chunk of dead weight bolted into the nose to keep the jet balanced. The Marines accepted them...