An estimated 30,000 people will be ironing out the kinks in their necks after spending the weekend gazing at the sky at the Omaka Classic Fighters Airshow near Blenheim, New Zealand. Airshow organiser Graham Orphan said that despite rain on Saturday, the crowd was out in force for the seventh biennial airshow at the Omaka [...]

The U.S. sent Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors to South Korea on Sunday to join military drills aimed at underscoring the U.S. commitment to defend Seoul in the face of an intensifying campaign of threats from North Korea. The advanced, radar-evading F-22s were deployed to Osan Air Base, the main U.S. Air Force base in South Korea, from Japan to support ongoing [...]

Two Airbus A380s made a dramatic tandem flight over the famous Australian landmark Sydney Harbour Bridge today to launch the new Qantas-Emirates partnership, hailed by the Australian carrier as a “seismic shift” in aviation. The tie-up, approved last week by Australia’s competition watchdog, allows the two airlines to combine operations for an initial period of five years, [...]

Thomas Hinderks felt like a kid at Christmas when two shipping containers delivered pieces of a Canadair CF-104D Starfighter aircraft to the Alberta Aviation Museum in Edmonton, Canada, Friday morning. After waiting almost 18 months to acquire the Cold War-era plane from the Netherlands, the museum’s executive director didn’t hesitate to sling himself up six feet [...]

1912 – Hanna Reitsch, German test pilot, was born; she was a test pilot on the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka and Dornier Do 17 as well as one of the few pilots to fly the Focke-Achgelis Fa 61, the first fully controllable helicopter. 1939 – The Curtiss YP-37 (shown above), a single-engined fighter based on the company’s [...]

Frank Montgomery doesn’t fit the image of the typical Vietnam veteran. First of all, he’s 89 years old, and Vietnam wasn’t his first taste of a combat zone. A World War II veteran who also served during the Korean War, Montgomery was flying North American P-51 Mustang fighter planes before most of his fellow Vietnam [...]

Diving from 17,000 feet, the airspeed increasing to more than three times what I’m used to in a Cessna 172, my instinct to pull out of the back side of a 6,000-foot-vertical loop is premature and aggressive — an understandable reaction to the visual sense of unprotected free-fall. As the front-seat pilot, I sit so [...]

China Eastern Airlines received the 1,000th Boeing airplane made for its namesake country yesterday in a delivery in Seattle. The jet, a 737-800 with the Boeing Sky Interior painted in special peacock livery, will join China Eastern Yunnan Airlines. China Eastern currently operates the largest 737 fleet among Chinese airlines. Boeing, which calls China one of the [...]