(Peter Garrison) Where Do Little Aeroplanes Come From? They grow in the heads of little kids… AS A YOUNG BOY I LOVED AEROPLANES. It was in the late forties and early fifties, the era when jets were replacing props. Except for the Douglas Skyraider – a great homely radial-engine taildraggingRead More →
Boasting record eVTOL pre-sales, UK company Vertical Aerospace (VA) is going public through a SPAC, with backing from Microsoft, American Airlines, Avolon, Honeywell and Rolls-Royce and a bulging US$4 billion-dollar pre-order book for as many as 1,000 of its VA-X4 eVTOL air taxis. The SPAC deal is a merger withRead More →
A propeller breaking in flight could result in your engine ripping itself off its mounting within seconds. As with most things that continually perform their duties without any hassles, we generally take the propeller for granted. Yes, we check it for chips and cracks during our pre-flight, but we don’tRead More →
One of the unexpected pleasures is having a fondly cherished idea booted into touch. For me one such notion was that hydrogen powered planes are not practical. Hydrogen has always just seemed like a bad idea – think of the Hindenburg disaster – and for a hundred other reasons. ONERead More →
The GK-1 is an amazing little plane that has been returned to its rightful place in the sky. It is like an affordable personal jet fighter, and is one of the very few homebuilts to successfully use a water-cooled car engine. THE GK-1 WAS BUILT IN THE LATE-1980S by GarthRead More →
(George Tonkin) – Almost simultaneously, both Gareth Pahl (one of my regular crewmen) and I received the message notification on our phones while flying a routine VISPOL (Visual Policing) sortie somewhere over Pretoria East: “Armed robbery in progress. Wonderboom area.” LOOKING FROM THE OUTSIDE IN, being a helicopter pilot canRead More →
SOUTH AFRICAN ATE was the first company to modify the MIL helicopter HIND into a SUPER HIND with new gun, FLIR and other refinements . The first customer was the ALGERIAN Air Force who were very happy with the changes, and thus giving a new lease of life for manyRead More →
As eVTOL manufacturers scramble to get next-gen air taxi aircraft certified and into full production, another set of companies are racing to establish themselves as air mobility service providers. These will become the Ubers of the sky. Some eVTOL manufacturers plan to do it themselves; Joby Aviation, for example, now ownsRead More →
This incredible photo was captured shortly after 10:30am Sunday 30th May 2021 at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport in Cheektowaga. Local photographer Matt Pulinski happened to be in the right place at the right time to snap this photo of a Learjet encountering a bird strike upon take-off. A largeRead More →
75 years after its first flight on the 22nd of May 1946, the ‘Chippy” is still flown and loved by many. From the late 1940s, the de Havilland Chipmunk became the RAF’s primary trainer aircraft. The RAF’s Battle of Britain Memorial Flight still has two Chipmunks, invaluable for training fighterRead More →
