While the Lukla Airport is known as the Hillary Airport (with the name of the other mountaineer first to Everest-  Tenzing – often thrown in the mix as ‘Tenzing Hillary Airport’), it’s often news to a lot of people that this wasn’t the first (or the only) airport Sir Edmund Hillary had built in the...

Pradip Bashyal, a BBC journalist based in Kathmandu and writer of the brilliant book “Sherpa” shares his thoughts on the airport that is “considered one of the most dangerous airfields in the world”– Lukla: “The runway at this airport, which is a brief strip of just 527m (1,729ft) starting at the edge of a cliff...

A report from Forbes pointed out that 2024 was “the deadliest in commercial aviation in six years.” This came against a backdrop of 2023 being the safest year for flying (as reported by IATA). 2025 has seen a number of crashes already- the most notable of them all being the collision between an American Airlines...

Most airliners still look like a tube with wings bolted onto it. That shape has stayed almost unchanged since the Boeing 707 flew in 1957. A double delta blended wing body aircraft breaks that pattern entirely, merging the wing and fuselage into one continuous lifting surface. The concept has moved from wind tunnels to real...

The decade of 1960 marked a very important period of space exploration as it saw the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik I, by the USSR officially beginning human adventure into uncharted territory outside the Earth. “Space” as we know it has the capacity to awe, frighten, and tremble us: “Surrounded by infinite space, and...

To triumph over the limitation of accessing space, any air-cum-space craft requires a complex mesh of systems that are not limited to propulsion, thermal protection, life support, navigation, and control. As opposed to aircraft using atmospheric air as oxidizers and only having to carry fuel, spacecraft need to carry their own oxidizers (in addition to...