Airplanes cruise at 460 to 575 mph, take off near 170 mph and land near 160 mph. Real speeds by aircraft type, and why every site quotes a different one.
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
Air France Flight 447 departed Rio de Janeiro’s Guarulhos Airport at 22:29 local time on June 1, 2009, bound for Paris Charles de Gaulle with 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board. Three and a half hours into the flight, as the Airbus A330 crossed the equatorial Atlantic at 35,000 feet, the autopilot disconnected.
The Boeing 737 MAX 8 operated as Lion Air Flight JT610 departed Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport at 06:20 local time on October 29, 2018, with 181 passengers and 8 crew members on board. Twelve minutes later, it struck the Java Sea at high speed. There were no survivors. The Indonesian accident investigation authority, KNKT, found
