Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
In the summer of 1941, a team of RAF aircrew climbed into a Consolidated B-24 Liberator at Gander, Newfoundland, and pointed its nose east toward Britain. The flight took roughly ten hours. Nobody wrote songs about it. There was no ticker-tape parade. But what those crews were doing — quietly, repeatedly, in stripped-out military transports…
Picture the scene at any major airline’s operations centre at two in the morning. A dispatcher is staring at a wall of weather data, fuel loads, NOTAM stacks, and route options for a long-haul departure in six hours. There are dozens of variables in play — jet stream position, alternate airport weather, payload, step-climb possibilities,…
Sit down in row 11 of an Airbus A220-300 and look out the window. Go on, really look. The window is enormous — noticeably, almost absurdly large compared to what you’d expect on a single-aisle narrowbody. You can see the whole engine. You can see the curve of the wing. On a clear day over…