Civil Aviation

China’s state-owned aircraft manufacturer, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC), launched the C919 programme in 2008 with one clear goal: to build a Chinese-made narrowbody jet that could challenge the Airbus A320 and Boeing 737 on domestic and international routes. The aircraft made its first commercial flight on 28 May 2023 with China Eastern…

The global rollout of fifth generation (5G) cellular networks has placed the aviation industry in a direct collision course with telecommunications regulators over a strip of radio frequency spectrum that sits immediately adjacent to the band used by aircraft radio altimeters. According to a report published in AeroTime, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed, as…

Several major airlines omit row 13 from their aircraft seating charts entirely, with seat numbering jumping directly from row 12 to row 14. The practice is a direct commercial response to triskaidekaphobia, the clinical term for the fear of the number 13, which first appeared in an American psychology journal in 1911 and continues to…

Himalaya Airlines (H9), Nepal’s Nepal-China joint-venture international carrier, commenced direct scheduled flight service between Tribhuvan International Airport (KTM), Kathmandu, and Shenzhen Bao’an International Airport (SZX) on June 4, 2026. The inaugural outbound service, flight H9 985, took off from Kathmandu at 09:59 PM local time carrying 98 passengers, landing in Shenzhen at 04:17 AM Chinese…

On May 26, 2026, Hermeus — a venture-backed defense aviation company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia — announced that its Quarterhorse Mk 2.1 unmanned aircraft had achieved its first supersonic flight, reaching a top speed of Mach 1.21, or approximately 930 miles per hour, during a test sortie at Spaceport America in New Mexico over the…

Boeing, the Chicago-headquartered aerospace giant founded in 1916 by William Boeing on the shores of Lake Union in Seattle, has shaped commercial aviation more profoundly than any other manufacturer in the industry’s history. Boeing’s aircraft types have defined every era of mass air travel from the piston age through the jet age through the composite…

Since Boeing’s 737-100 rolled out at Boeing’s Renton factory in January 1967, the type has accumulated more than 7,000 deliveries in its Next Generation (NG) form alone, produced over 2,200 737 MAX aircraft, and maintains a backlog that has grown the company’s total orderbook to a record $695 billion. In addition, the 737 family accounting…

On 19 July 1989, United Airlines (UA) Flight 232, a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-10 operating the Denver–Chicago–Philadelphia corridor, suffered a catastrophic uncontained failure of its tail-mounted No. 2 engine at 37,000 feet above northern Iowa, severing all three of its independent hydraulic systems simultaneously. Of the 296 people on board — 285 passengers and 11 crew…

The aircraft elevator is one of the three primary flight control surfaces that govern fixed-wing flight, alongside the ailerons and the rudder. Situated at the trailing edge of the horizontal stabilizer in the tail section (a region aeronautical engineers call the empennage), the elevator controls the aircraft’s pitch: the rotation of the nose up or…