Multimedia

If all goes as planned, the world’s most ambitious telescope—not just space telescope but any telescope—will launch this week on an Arianspace booster from French Guiana. It will ultimately be deployed at what’s called an L2 Lagrange point about one million miles from Earth’s orbit and sufficiently close to the sun to require a tennis-court […]

Even if you’re not building an airplane, you probably have need to bore holes in metal from time to time. In this continuing series by our sister publication KITPLANES, Paul Dye explains the finer points of using a step drill, sometimes also called a UnitBit. Basically, it makes a big hole out of a smaller […]

Editor’s note: Last week, my friend David Shelton shot this spectacular video of mountain paragliding in Mexico. Tapalpa is in Mexico’s Sierra Madre region about 400 miles west of Mexico City. Here’s his report. –Paul Bertorelli Last week, I enjoyed a fine week of soaring in Mexico, along with 16 members of my paragliding family. […]

From the One-More-Time-But-With-Pictures file comes this week’s Best of the Web video. It was posted by Cessna Centurion owner Edward Frye earlier this week. It depicts a successful runway turnback after a catastrophic engine failure. Total time in the air: one minute, 12 seconds. Frye does a nice job of analyzing the incident, including illuminating […]

Light sport airplanes were supposed to be a cheaper alternative to certified aircraft and they are. But AVweb’s look at the accident record of these airplanes confirms what many skeptics worried about: They suffer more crashes than standard category aircraft. This video, first published in 2018, explains why. Editor’s note: The former owner of the […]