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The story of the Spruce Goose is a part of aviation lore that everyone should know. Like the story of the ill-fated HMS Titanic, it’s a story of the problems with making something that holds the title of “world’s largest.” If you were alive in the mid-1940s, you would know the name Spruce Goose. It […]

Many people realize that drag is a factor in how something looks or how sleek it is. But aircraft make many different kinds of drag. So to design a plane, or even just to operate one, you have to have an idea of what makes each type of drag better or worse. What is Drag […]

Everyone knows that pilots speak a language all their own, full of jargon and acronyms for everything. Weather reports are one of the worst offenders. Many of these codes and abbreviations are holdouts from the days of faxed text-only weather reports between air traffic controllers and forecasters. A SIGMET is a weather report of hazardous […]

Push-pull aircraft are supposedly the best of both worlds. They have the increased reliability and peace of mind of multi-engines whilst often maintaining the aerodynamic qualities and efficiencies of single engine aircraft when the engines are set out in a “centerline thrust” configuration. Most aircraft built up until this point have been powered by a […]

Ever since Igor Sikorsky invented the first helicopter back in 1939, literally hundreds of helicopters have been produced. Some of the helicopters have become wildly famous, whilst others are barely footnotes in the pages of history. The world’s most famous helicopters are so for many different, yet often interrelated, reasons, including: Our list includes both […]

It’s no secret that aircraft are loud. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen governments attempt to limit how loud aircraft can be at airports, especially those close to highly built-up areas.  Whilst most modern commercial jet aircraft easily comply with these regulations, many older jets do not, and as such, risk being banned from […]

“We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor?” You might be a pilot if you’ve heard that line from the 1980 movie Airplane! repeated a million times. Like all great laugh-out-loud lines, there’s some truth in the humor–pilots really do speak in their own language sometimes. A vector in aviation is simply a […]

Today, fighter jets are the backbone of the world’s air forces. However, they can be separated into one of five different categories, known as “generations” based on their age, tactical configuration and the technology found onboard.  Indeed, the notion of a “generation” fighter isn’t even that old: it was coined in the 1990s and is […]

Instrument flying comes with a huge bowl of new alphabet soup to swallow. Nearly all navigational aids and systems have identifying acronyms to set them apart from one another. NDB, VOR, GPS, and so on. But then, these systems can be combined into systems for specific uses, like instrument approaches (IAPs)—RNAV, ILS, LPV, APV, ADF, […]

If you’ve ever seen a fighter jet from behind during takeoff, you’ve probably noticed that the engines have a certain glow. This glow is caused by something called an afterburner, but what exactly is it? An afterburner, also called a reheat in some countries, is an additional component added to some jet engines to increase […]