Skyports Infrastructure held a preview last week of its now complete vertiport at Bicester Motion in Oxfordshire. This is one of the UK’s first testing grounds and hubs for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) flights. Vertiports are a key component of the Advanced Air Mobility (AAM)...
A Texas-based start-up, Venus Aerospace, is developing a next-generation rocket engine that could power hypersonic* aircraft. This includes passenger aircraft flying from conventional runways. They aim to reach speeds between four to six times the speed of sound. At Mach 4, passengers could leave London and arrive...
Vertical Aerospace, last week, reached a landmark in the development of their VX4 eVTOL, by making the first-ever piloted wingborne flight of a winged eVTOL in European open airspace. Electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing (eVTOL) aircraft developers around the world are edging nearer and nearer to fully...
Archer Aviation has been selected as the Official Air Taxi Provider for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, Paralympic Games, and Team USA . This mirrors the plans of Volocopter at last year’s Olympics in Paris, which in the end failed to come about. Similarly, Archer’s Midnight eVTOL...
An interesting article appeared in the Southern Daily Echo regional newspaper yesterday, about a Britten-Norman Trislander joining the collection at the Solent Sky museum in Southampton Iconic Trislander at Solent Sky Museum in Southampton What struck me was some of the slightly mean-minded comments about the Trislander,...
We are supposedly on the brink of an aviation revolution and the general public have little idea what’s about to happen. The moment is soon coming when the aviation technologies that many people are vaguely aware off, actually transition into the real thing. When people see an...
This is an interesting tale. A Fokker D.VII fighter aircraft is being returned to the Netherlands where it will go on display at the National Military Museum, Soesterberg. The biplane was designed during the First World War, and went into service with the Dutch Fleet Air Arm...
There’s more to this weird box-frame aeroplane than you would imagine. Over 1500 were produced by the Caudron brothers, René and Gaston, in their factory at Le Crotoy on the eastern side of the Somme estuary, from 1913 onward. And it proved to be, despite appearances, tough,...
United have signed a deal with SpaceX to bring the Starlink Wi-Fi service to the airline’s mainline and regional aircraft fleet, for free. United customers will enjoy the same high-speed, low-latency internet service in the air that they enjoy on the ground. The new, gate-to-gate connectivity will...
You could say, the Newark Aviation Museum is having a bit of a lie down! The museum has just been loaned the extraordinary Gloster Meteor F8 Prone, which has been on display at the RAF Museum, Cosford* for many years. The Meteor F8 Prone was built in...
United Airlines now texts customers flying in the USA links to local, live radar maps during weather delays, in an effort to give travellers as much real-time information as possible about their trip, especially if things don’t go as planned. For the past few years, the airline...
American Airlines have announced that it has entered into a conditional purchase agreement with clean aviation innovator ZeroAvia for 100 hydrogen-electric engines intended to power regional jet aircraft with zero in flight emissions except for water vapor. ZeroAvia is developing hydrogen-electric (fuel cell-powered) engines for commercial aircraft,...
Zipline, a company specialising in autonomous drone delivery systems, announced on Friday that it had just completed one million paid commercial drone deliveries to customers. The company, headquartered San Francisco, has developed and operates its own autonomous drones which have now flown more than 70 million commercial...
The Air & Space Museum (Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace), sprawled around the magnificent art deco terminal building at Paris’ former passenger airport, Le Bourget, is France’s premier aviation museum. It’s huge, and well worth the journey to the outskirts of Paris to visit. Only, make...
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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