Tim de Vries

TWA Flight 800 had already been on the ground at John F. Kennedy International Airport for more than an hour when it finally pushed back from the gate on the evening of July 17, 1996. The aircraft was a Boeing 747-131, registration N93119, manufactured in 1971 and now in its 25th year of service. It

LeBron James is worth over $1 billion. He is the first active NBA player to reach that milestone. He earns tens of millions a year from his Nike lifetime deal alone, holds stakes in Liverpool FC, the Boston Red Sox, and the Pittsburgh Penguins, and runs one of sport’s most successful business empires. He does

Most billionaires buy a private jet and move on. Larry Ellison bought a Gulfstream, sued a city for the right to land it after dark, staged mock dogfights over the Pacific in a retired Italian Air Force trainer, and tried to import a decommissioned MiG-29 fighter jet from Russia. The US government stopped him on

The tail numbers are the first clue. N887WM commemorates August 1987, the month Bill Gates met Melinda French at a Microsoft dinner in New York. N194WM marks January 1994, the month they married in Hawaii. Both registrations are held by MENTE LLC, a Gates-controlled entity in Washington State, and both aircraft are Gulfstream G650ERs worth

Types of planes explained: airliners, cargo, private jets, general aviation, helicopters, military, drones, eVTOL, seaplanes, airships, and gliders.

ValuJet Flight 592 departed Miami International Airport on the afternoon of May 11, 1996, bound for Atlanta on what should have been a routine two-hour flight. The aircraft was a McDonnell Douglas DC-9-32, registration N904VJ. There were 105 passengers and 5 crew members on board. The weather was clear, visibility unrestricted. Six minutes after takeoff,

On the morning of March 27, 1977, a bomb in the passenger terminal at Gran Canaria’s Las Palmas Airport diverted dozens of flights to Los Rodeos Airport on the neighboring island of Tenerife. Los Rodeos was a small regional airport, built for inter-island traffic, and by early afternoon its taxiways were lined with wide-body jets

When Mark Zuckerberg’s brand-new Gulfstream G700 lifted off from Monterey, California on its maiden flight in December 2024, it burned 5,500 kilograms of fuel and deposited 19 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere before touching down at his 1,500-acre estate on Kauai. It was a fitting debut for an aircraft that costs roughly $80 million

When Jeff Bezos touched down in Venice for his 2025 wedding to Lauren Sánchez, he didn’t arrive alone. Around 90 private jets descended on northern Italy that weekend, ferrying tech royalty, celebrities, and world leaders to what became the most photographed private aviation event in recent memory. That spectacle, more than any single aircraft, captures

Commercial aviation is the safest form of long-distance travel in the history of transportation. That fact is not inevitable, and it is not accidental. It is the result of generations of accident investigators, engineers, and regulators who examined failures with methodical precision and then changed the rules. Every time something went wrong and people died,