Irma, a Category 5 hurricane, is currently making landfall in the Caribbean on the islands east of Puerto Rico, and, like they have with other storms, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has sent planes in to the storm’s eye. Things get intense. And by intense, I mean pants-shittingly terrifying.
Peter Sripol is a talented engineer with an obsession for building RC planes using unorthodox materials. Instead of balsa wood, he’s built working aircraft using Lego, and even Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets. But his masterpiece is successfully turning a tortilla into the world’s first edible aircraft.
While scouring large swaths of land for prey, predators like hawks and eagles will often take advantage of rising thermals to stay airborne and glide for extended periods with minimal effort. Humans have copied this approach which allows sailplanes to fly without a motor, but Microsoft is now teaching an AI how to…
Donald Trump loves a good deal. And the United States Air Force just found one for the president, sitting in a Mojave Desert boneyard: two brand new Boeing 747-8's, the very same planes that the military plans to convert into the next Air Force One aircraft. These two have an interesting origin story, too.
It’s no secret that airline travel is more miserable than ever, with increasing lengths of time spent on the tarmac, “family fees,” lines to pass through security growing and growing, and the increasing prospect of being manhandled by said security. If you manage to avoid any of those problems, you’re still virtually…
NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center is currently in the process of uploading hundreds of extremely rare films to YouTube. And I’d advise you to stop reading if you want to get any work done today.
With an electronics ban in place for most flights coming from the Middle East and North Africa, and the threat of a laptop ban hanging over our heads, there’s a good chance you’ll have to check your expensive electronics with your luggage on an upcoming flight. Too bad there’s nothing you can do to cover loss or…
THE SITUATION: You’re on a plane and the plane has landed. NOW: Let me explain to you what NOT to do—and what to do instead.
After spending 40 years and unspeakable amounts of investor money to make his dream a reality, Paul Moller’s flying car is finally available for purchase. But because flying cars are perpetually “just two years away,” Moller is actually auctioning off his original prototype, not a production model.
Somewhere over the Hamptons, the pilot told me to take the controls. To my left, there was a joystick, roughly the same size and dimension as my favorite ‘90s arcade game, After Burner. I clutched it, pulled back, and felt the jet climb.
To kill time on an airplane, I usually play games on my phone. I can usually squeeze a good five or six hours out of the battery. But last month when I flew from New York to Hawaii, the trip ended up taking a full 24 hours, and I was trapped on a plane for 18 of those. In an attempt to preserve my sanity, I decided to…
Flyer beware.
In the land of no wings, the KFC bucket is king. That’s the theory YouTube supergeek Peter Sripol set out to prove recently by building an RC plane with nothing but greasy KFC buckets for wings. And guess what: it worked.
Oh great, another thing to worry about. First, it was exploding hoverboards. Then, it was exploding phones. Now we have exploding headphones—on airplanes!
Military bigwigs gathered in Orlando this week for the annual AirWarfare Symposium to discuss big plans for big weapons that do big damage. According to a report, the biggest unfunded project that U.S. Special Operations Command hopes to push through is a C-130 that’s equipped with a power laser weapon.
The windows in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are awesome. You can electronically dim them for five different levels of sunlight and visibility. That’s so much better than the typical airplane window shade option of blinding or blocked out. But the coolest thing about Dreamliner windows are how huge they are, like vertical…
To my eye, the clouds that airplane wings make on takeoff and landing look like some cool ass force field—like, a stealth shroud that envelopes the airplane as its flying around. Reality is less fun though, because the clouds that are rolling over the wings of the airplane are caused by the lift forces that let our…
On Sunday, Delta Airlines temporarily grounded all domestic flights due to an unexplained technical error, the second major American airline to do so in the last seven days.
London’s Heathrow Airport is one of the busiest airports in the world, so it’s no surprise that if you look up in the sky during the morning rush, you’ll see a line of airplanes swarming around, patiently waiting to land on its runways. This video from TopFelya shows 30 minutes of morning arrivals and there’s a plane…
Iceland’s board of tourism is doing something right because the country has become a vacation hotspot in recent years. Apparently, even the flight up north can be a spectacular experience, as you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the northern lights from 35,000 feet.
