Stephen J. Thorne

The Queen of the skies: Iconic Lancaster flies again

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

She’s a big lumbering brute but, oh, how she flies!

Proponents of the Spitfire would no doubt take umbrage, but devotees of the bigger warbirds of the Second World War unabashedly call the Avro Lancaster the most beautiful aircraft ever built.

The crews who survived those long, cold and terrifying night missions over Germany—stragglers limping home, as they so often did, with their fuselages riddled by flak and 30mm cannon rounds, chunks of plane missing and wounded or dead aboard, hoping against hope they weren’t pursued—no doubt have a case.

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Wikimedia

The mathematical miracle of the Gimli Glider

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

It is a sound you never want to hear while manning a 132-ton Boeing 767-200 at 41,000 feet in the air. And despite their accumulated 22,000 hours of flying time, Captain Robert “Bob” Pearson and First Officer Maurice Quintal had never heard a sound quite like it either, emitting from the depths of the plane’s Engine Indicator and Crew Alerting System (EICAS). It was a sharp-tongued, steel-plated bong.

“Oh fuck,” Pearson blurted into the cockpit voice recorder.

The engines of Air Canada Flight 143–what would come to be known as the “Gimli Glider” – had flamed out.

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IWM/Wikimedia

Military decoys work as well now as they did eight decades ago

STORY BY STEPHEN J. THORNE

You don’t have to speak Russian to get the message. The pictures and the accompanying audio on a recent internet post tell the story.

The drone video of a target parked next to a shed and partially hidden by vegetation is set to a heavy beat; shortly after, there’s an explosion and fire, followed by the guttural utterings of an evidently boastful narrator.

The Telegram channel Kremlin Pachka posted the video in early-June, lauding it as evidence of a Lancet drone strike on a Ukrainian tank near Krasnolimansky—Lyman to the Ukrainians who live there—in the country’s Donetsk Oblast.

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CEFRG

To Kill the Right to Kill

STORY BY PAIGE JASMINE GILMAR

“The country as a whole will rue the day this has happened,” Progressive Conservative MP Allan Lawrence admonished.

An ominous warning, Lawrence had said these very words shortly after a free vote on Bill C-34 in Parliament. By a 130-124 standing, Canada had, mostly, abolished the death penalty. It still applied, under the National Defence Act, for members of the Armed Forces found guilty of cowardice, desertion, unlawful surrender, or spying for the enemy.

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