This photograph is so remarkably perfectly timed, I thought it must be a still from an action movie or television series, done with special effects. It turns out it’s absolutely a case of impeccable photography by Mr Robert W Madden, who was at the right place at the right time and managed to frame the…
Read more… 12 Dec 14
The Lockheed SR-71 has broken every speed and altitude record held by aircraft: faster than a speeding bullet and able to fly in the top 1% of our atmosphere. The jet was designed in the 1960s, at the peak of the Cold War, as a reconnaissance jet that could operate at high speeds (Mach 3.5+)…
Read more… 27 Jun 14
A reader mailed me this amazing aviation photograph and I knew I wanted to know more. I was surprised at how much I discovered about the photo, which at first glance I thought might be a fake. But the story of who took the photograph and how he managed to get the shot is a…
Read more… 1 Nov 13
This week, the space shuttle Endeavour travelled across the U.S. to its final destination of Los Angeles, where it will be on display as a part of the California Science Center. The Endeavour completed 25 missions, spent 299 days in orbit and orbited the Earth 4,671 times while travelling 122,883,151 statute miles. The fleet was…
Read more… 21 Sep 12
In June, Christian Semcesen and the other members of his flying club in Oslo, Norway, flew 500 nautical miles from Kjeller Airport (ENKJ) to Bodø (ENBO) for an airshow. The planes: two ex-Norwegian Army Cubs, two Tiger Moths, a PT-19 Cornell and a Chipmunk, Bird Dog, a Broussard and a T-6 Texan. Christian flew the…
Read more… 3 Aug 12
This video of a frozen plane was posted to reddit and made me shiver: “After a night of freezing rain, this is what we showed up to. Almost an inch of pure ice on almost every surface of the plane. Even the antennas were completely cased in ice.” It struck me because today is a…
Read more… 27 Jan 12
On the 28th of May 2019, a customer arrived at a flight school at Archerfield Airport, Queensland for their first flight experience. The aircraft that day was a Cessna 152,…
The Gulfstream G150, a twin-engine business jet, arrived at Kittilä airport in Lapland on a cold Tuesday afternoon on the 2nd of January 2018, carrying three crew and four passengers.…
When I was learning to fly, I remember someone in the pilots’ bar insisting that all that talk about life jackets under your seat was a waste of time; if…
This photograph has been posted to aviation forums repeatedly, each time with a thread of pilots wondering what the hell could have happened to cause the light aircraft to be…
I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…
The Beagle B.121 Pup is a British, single-engine, all-metal aircraft produced in the 1960s. British Executive and General Aviation Limited, who traded as BEAGLE, designed the Beagle B.121 Pup as…
When the Kantonspolizei Zürich (the police department of the Swiss canton of Zurich) posted a photograph on Facebook showing the contents of a standard patrol car, they had no idea…
I was on the radio on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in a show called The History Listen. They asked me to tell them about a famous story in Australian and…