The X-47B Drone Has Landed on a Carrier, And War May Never Be the Same

It's not often that we get to witness aviation history being made, but when we do, it's often awesome. Such is the case with the U.S. Navy's X-47B which just became the first unmanned aircraft to land on an aircraft carrier. (gizmodo.com) More...

Japanese airlines suspend Dreamliner flights after emergency landing

Two Japanese airlines grounded their fleets of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which has been beset by a string of mechanical and other problems, after an All Nippon Airways flight made an emergency landing Wednesday. (www.cnn.com) More...

Why Pilots Hate the Idea of Cameras Watching Them Fly

If search teams ever find the wreckage of Malaysia Flight 370, a significant shortcoming of the plane’s black boxes system could revive a proposal that’s been kicked around for 14 years: Putting cameras in cockpits. (www.wired.com) More...

MH370: Likely piece of doomed plane found

A piece of wreckage from a Boeing 777 -- likely from MH370 -- was found washed ashore over the weekend on the coast of Mozambique, a U.S. official told CNN on Wednesday. (www.cnn.com) More...

Why 40-Year-Old Tech Is Still Running America’s Air Traffic Control

On Friday, September 26, 2014, a telecommunications contractor named Brian Howard woke early and headed to Chicago Center, an air traffic control hub in Aurora, Illinois, where he had worked for eight years. He had decided to get stoned and kill himself, and as his final gesture he planned to take a chunk of the US air traffic control system with him. (www.wired.com) More...

Time lapse of an airport makes airplanes look like shooting stars

Aside from going through security and lugging around your carry on and rushing to the gate and avoiding human swarms, airplanes are magical places. Okay, maybe not. But there's beauty in how they operate. Just watch this ballet of airplanes at Shanghai's airport. It's like seeing man made shooting stars. (sploid.gizmodo.com) More...

11 Things We No Longer See on Airplanes

Traveling by airplane is a lot different than it used to be. And we’re not just talking about the elaborate and cumbersome security restrictions that get added every time some wacko sticks a bomb in his BVDs. There used to be a lot of amenities, but they were gradually eliminated after President Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in 1978 and cost-effectiveness suddenly became a corporate concern. Here are 11 things that we never see on most commercial flights today that were common… (mentalfloss.com) More...

What it's like to fly a fighter jet

No music. No flashy moves. No missile launches. And yet this video is still incredible. It's just flying sequence after flying sequence of Russian Air Force MiG-31s cruising through the sky. Filmed by GoPro cameras strapped to a MiG, this footage is probably the closest we'll ever get to flying a fighter jet. Seeing the world from such a powerful beast of a machine somehow simplifies things. (sploid.gizmodo.com) More...

The Last Supersonic Flight of the Concorde Was 10 Years Ago Today

We were promised supersonic flights. Today, we stay well below the speed of sound. We were promised transatlantic flights from New York to London in 3 and a half hours. Today, that flight takes us 7 hours. We were promised the future of flying. That future hasn't existed for 10 years. The last flight of the Concorde was on October 24, 2003, we've been flying on slow-haul planes since. (gizmodo.com) More...

EgyptAir Flight 804: Cockpit voice recorder found damaged

The cockpit voice recorder from EgyptAir Flight 804 has been found damaged, the Egyptian investigative committee said Thursday in a statement. The memory unit "which is the most important part of the recorder" was retrieved, the statement said. (www.cnn.com) More...