Share this story On paper, the C-5 Galaxy is the most capable military transport aircraft ever built by the Western world. In practice, on any given day in 2025, 63 percent of the fleet is broken. That number — 37 percent mission capable — is not a rounding error or a...
Share this story Summer hasn’t officially started, but the chaos arrived early. On May 12, 2026, a cascade of delays, cancellations, and ground stops swept across American airports like a storm front — which, in many cases, it literally was. Phoenix Sky Harbor...
Share this story On a clear Sunday morning in late April, a small white aircraft with six tilting propellers lifted off from John F. Kennedy International Airport and headed northwest toward the gleaming towers of Midtown Manhattan. Seven minutes later, it touched...
Jacqueline Cochran grew up as an orphan in rural Florida, picking cotton and sleeping on the floor of a shack. By 40, she held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other pilot alive — male or female. The distance between those two facts was covered...
Share this story It is 0200 hours in the Eastern Mediterranean. The flight deck of USS Gerald R. Ford smells faintly of jet fuel and seawater. A yellow-shirted Air Boss raises an arm. Three hundred feet of catapult — not steam, not for the first time in U.S. naval...
Share this story By 1939 the biplane was supposed to be finished. Monoplane fighters — the Bf 109, the Spitfire, the Hurricane — were establishing what air combat in World War II would look like. And yet the Soviet Union was, that same year, accepting deliveries of a...
Share this story In 1960 the Convair B-58 Hustler was, by every measurable standard, the most advanced combat aircraft on Earth. It could sustain Mach 2 — a speed contemporary fighters could reach only in short dashes. It carried a thermonuclear weapon in a detachable...
Share this story It is the kind of idea that should never have left the napkin. Take a small tank, weighing roughly 5.5 tonnes. Bolt on a biplane-style wing and a twin-boom tail. Tow the assembly into the air behind a heavy bomber. Cast it off over enemy lines. Let...
Share this story Bill Allen, the buttoned-down chief executive of Boeing in 1955, was on a boat. So were the executives of every major airline in the United States — gathered on Lake Washington outside Seattle for the annual Gold Cup hydroplane race. Bill Allen had...
Share this story The Airbus A220 has been the most underestimated commercial airliner of the past decade — a Canadian-designed jet (originally the Bombardier C Series) that quietly piled up loyal customers and stellar dispatch reliability while the headlines went to...
Florence Leontine Lowe grew up on a Pasadena estate so grand it employed 26 servants. She married a minister at 18, had a son, and then, in 1928, dressed as a man and escaped on a banana boat to Mexico under the name “Pancho.” She was 26 years old and she...
Share this story Before the rockets. Before the electric cars became mainstream. Before Mars, before the tunnels, before the social media platform — there was a young South African entrepreneur in the Nevada desert, strapped into the cockpit of a Cold War-era jet,...
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