Aircraft, airlines, history, and the future of flight.
There is a moment, roughly forty minutes out of Kathmandu, when the Himalayan foothills stop looking like hills and start looking like walls. The Twin Otter or the Dornier you are sitting in is threading through valleys that would qualify as dramatic scenery anywhere else on the planet and here register as merely the warm-up…
Picture the moment a widebody swings off the active runway onto a high-speed exit, visibility down to a few hundred metres in patchy fog, taxiway lights blurring into one long amber smear. The crew has just flown a long sector. The captain is talking to ground control. The first officer is running the after-landing checklist.…
Stand at a gate and watch an A330neo push back, and there’s a good chance the person next to you doesn’t give it a second glance. It doesn’t have the mystique of a 787. It doesn’t wear the sheer scale of a 777. It’s just an Airbus, they think — a familiar wide-body shape with…