The Royal Mail has announced a trial of the first out-of-sight, autonomous scheduled drone flights between the UK mainland and an island. The trial will use Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flights initially to deliver Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), COVID testing kits and other mail to the Isles...
Italy’s Minister of Culture, Dario Franceschini, has announced the winner of a technical tender to design and build a new stage floor for the 2,000 year old Colosseum. The original wooden arena floor covered an underground network of rooms and corridors, which housed the waiting animals, gladiators...
London City Airport has just become the world’s first major international airport to be controlled remotely from an entirely digital control tower. Its new 50 metre (164 feet) Air Traffic Control (ATS) tower allows controllers 115 km (70 miles) away in Swanwick, Hampshire, to control all movements...
The twin-engine Bristol Blenheim was the RAF’s primary light bomber at the start of WW2. This one, a Blenheim IV, is on display at the RAF museum in Hendon. (When we can get to see it!) The Bristol Blenheim – or ‘Bolingbroke’ if you were flying the...
Britain’s original Formula 1 team, British Racing Motors (BRM), is marking its 70th anniversary by building three authentic ‘new’ 1950s V16 F1 race cars, and you’ll be able to see the first later this year. On 14th July 1951, a new team, BRM, entered two astonishing cars...
Norway’s long-awaited Stad Ship Tunnel has been given a green light. The world’s first ship tunnel will allow large ships to avoid the notoriously exposed and treacherous piece of sea at the tip of the 27 km Stad Peninsula in Vestland, on the southwest coast of Norway....
The French seaside town and ferry port was expecting its famous mechanical dragon to be operating in the build up to Christmas and New Year, but COVID-19 struck again and so the Compagnie du Dragon has been using the downtime for a bit of maintenance. I got...
Filming starts next month on the next big-budget war movie, Devotion, which tells the real life story of U.S. Navy pilots Tom Hudner and Jesse Brown. The History The duo came from completely different, post-World War II, backgrounds. Tom was a white New Englander from a wealthy...
In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, NATO developed ZELL – the Zero-Length Launch system, using rocket-assisted F-104 Starfighters and other primary attack aircraft. Being right on the border with the Eastern Bloc, West Germany in particular had little time to identify and intercept...
Many people know that President Kennedy’s elder brother died tragically during World War II, in a colossal airborne explosion over East Anglia in the UK on 12 Aug 1944. Not many, including myself, knew that the event was witnessed by Col. Elliott Roosevelt, son of FDR who...
Last week the U.S. National Park Service announced $2,208,110 in grants from the American Battlefield Protection Program to protect 169.03 acres of America’s Civil War battlefields. Unlike the UK, where so many of our battlefield sites are already lost to history, or under threat from developers (See...
The light installation Een Spoor van Water (A Trail of Water) by artist Matthias Oostrik was unveiled this week under a railway bridge in the Dutch city of Assen. Each passing train activates a unique light composition, incorporated into the paving and plant beds underneath. While I...
The Salis Flying Museum (Musée Volant Salis) has an amazing collection of around 50* historic aircraft at its hilltop airfield, 35 kms south of Paris. It’s the drip trays you notice. Drip trays are a rare sight in most aviation museums because, before they go on static...
When 33 single-handed yachtsmen and women set off from Les Sables d’Olonne in France tomorrow, to race non-stop around the world for the Vendée Globe trophy, there’s a good chance they will do so quicker and safer than ever before. That will be down to state-of-the-art technology...
This is a niche blog about technically-minded travel. It reflects my own interests in the mechanical, technical, historical, engineering, transport and military world.
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