Insights, updates, and aviation stories.
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 […]
There are more than 50,000 commercial flights in the air on any given day, but commercial airliners represent only a small fraction of the aircraft types currently flying. Add military jets, private planes, helicopters, drones, gliders, and the newest eVTOL air taxis, and the full picture of what humanity puts into the sky runs to […]
Most commercial airliners cruise between 460 and 575 mph (740–925 km/h), or roughly Mach 0.78 to Mach 0.85. They take off at about 160–180 mph and touch down at around 150–165 mph. But “how fast does a plane go” depends entirely on the type: a single-engine trainer cruises near 140 mph, while a military jet […]
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, […]
US Airways Flight 1549 departed LaGuardia Airport’s Runway 04 at 15:24:54 local time on January 15, 2009, bound for Charlotte Douglas with 150 passengers and 5 crew members on board. At 15:27:11, approximately 2.5 minutes into the climb and at an altitude of about 2,818 feet over Queens, New York, the aircraft entered a flock […]