Share this story On 24 November 1955 a high-winged prototype registered PH-NIV took to the air for the first time. It had two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops, a pressurised cabin and an airframe in which much of the metal was glued together rather than riveted. According...
Share this story On 20 August 1963 a small, sharp-nosed jet in British United Airways colours lifted off from Hurn, near Bournemouth. It had two Rolls-Royce engines bolted to the back of the fuselage, a tailplane perched on top of the fin, and a head start that its...
Share this story Somewhere over Kansas, a white Cessna jet has been flying itself to the ground on purpose. Textron Aviation test pilots have been pressing the button that every owner hopes never to touch, and watching the airplane pick an airport, talk to air traffic...
Share this story For six years, a pale smudge in a satellite photo of a Pacific lagoon kept one of aviation’s oldest questions alive. Seen from orbit, the shape near Nikumaroro’s Taraia Peninsula looked long, bright and suspiciously metallic. Up close, it...
Share this story LATAM flight LA2302 never left Lima for Piura. On the morning of Monday 19 October 2026, a LATAM Airlines Perú Airbus A320 caught fire on the ground at Lima’s Jorge Chávez International Airport, minutes from departure. Videos shared by...
Share this story Somewhere over the middle of the North Atlantic, a few hundred airliners are flying through airspace where nobody can see them. There is no radar out there. For most of the crossing there is no VHF radio either. The nearest controller is in Prestwick...
Share this story A Boeing 747-8 holds 238,610 litres of fuel. Boeing prints the figure in its own airport planning document, to the litre, alongside the 63,034 US gallons and 191,565 kilogrammes that are the same quantity in other clothes. It is the number search...
Share this story In Las Vegas today, on the eve of NBAA-BACE, SyberJet Aircraft is pulling the covers off a full-scale mockup of the SJ36 at Henderson Executive Airport. It is a nine-seat light jet that, on paper, would fly faster and farther than anything else in its...
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 It was a clear night over the Lebombo Mountains, with ten kilometres of visibility and only scattered cloud. At 21:21 on 19 October 1986, a Tupolev Tu-134 carrying the President of Mozambique flew into a hillside at Mbuzini, just inside South Africa...
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