Share this story On Monday morning, Lufthansa flew its last Airbus A340-600 passenger service into Frankfurt. The Boeing 747 has been out of production since 2022. The last Airbus A380 was delivered in 2021. In barely five years, the four-engined long-haul airliner...
Share this story On Sunday night, an Austrian Airlines A320 flying from Tel Aviv to Vienna received a bomb threat, diverted to Sofia under a Bulgarian MiG-29 escort, and landed safely. Nothing was found. That is how almost all of these end. But the crew could not know...
Share this story In the small hours of 2 July 1919, at East Fortune in Scotland, the order came to walk her out. Ground crews hauled a 643-foot hydrogen airship out of its shed into a cold, misty north-easterly wind. On board were around 30 men, a kitten called...
Share this story At Frankfurt on Monday morning, a very long white airliner rolled out on the runway, slowed, and turned off for the last time with passengers aboard. Lufthansa flight LH419 from Washington Dulles had landed on schedule after eight hours and five...
Share this story On Sunday afternoon, 18 October 2026, families waved from Portsmouth’s Round Tower as HMS Prince of Wales slipped out to sea for the second phase of Operation Firecrest. She sails to take charge of the UK Carrier Strike Group in the North...
Share this story Picture a moonless night in the North Sea. Somewhere below, an enemy battle squadron is steaming hard, blacked out. Above it, at little more than 40 knots, a strange four-engined monoplane drifts along at 1,500 feet, its crew peering into the dark and...
Share this story The boarding music is still playing when it drifts down the aisle: a stale, cheesy, slightly chemical smell. Crews have a name for it. They call it “dirty socks”, sometimes “wet dog”. Most passengers wrinkle their noses and...
Share this story A flying boat that sank U-boats off Iceland. A homebuilt biplane that took one Washington State couple more than a decade. A powered hang glider that lifted off a frozen Wisconsin lake in 1975 and started a movement. They now share a roof in Oshkosh....
Share this story Ask anyone in American aviation how you get hired by an airline and you will be given a number. Fifteen hundred hours. It is the single best-known figure in the industry, it is quoted as though it were a law of physics, and almost every part of it is...
Share this story Almost everything that flies in the United States is wrapped in paperwork. A certificate for the pilot. A medical for the pilot. A registration for the aeroplane. An airworthiness certificate for the aeroplane, and an annual inspection to keep it....
Share this story Everyone remembers Britain’s three V-bombers: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan and the Handley Page Victor. Almost nobody remembers the fourth. It had straight wings, engines stacked one on top of the other, and a job description that...
Share this story On 29 July 1950, fourteen paying passengers boarded an aircraft at RAF Northolt, west of London, and flew to Paris Le Bourget. Nothing about the trip was unusual except the engines. It was the first scheduled airline flight by any turbine-powered...
Recent Comments