Share this story The F-104 Starfighter has one of the worst reputations in military aviation. Germany bought 916 of them, lost 292, and buried 116 pilots. The Luftwaffe called it the Witwenmacher — the Widowmaker.On one night in January 1982, that aircraft did...
Share this story In November 1983, a 31-year-old Quebec pilot landed a light aircraft by himself at a small airfield in Georgia. It was loaded with marijuana, flown up from Jamaica. Police were waiting.He was sentenced to five years and served sixteen months. He...
Share this story In 2025 the world spent $2,887 billion on its armed forces. That is the highest figure SIPRI has ever recorded, the eleventh consecutive annual increase, and it works out at $352 for every person alive.Below is what that money bought, counted as...
Share this story Stand at any airport window and count the aircraft. Almost all of them are white, with a tail and a bit of branding to tell them apart. Airlines spend fortunes on brand identity, and then paint their single most visible asset the same colour as...
Share this story In 2009, Fairbanks International Airport in Alaska closed a runway, sent out crews, and repainted the enormous white numbers at both ends. Runway 1L–19R became runway 2L–20R.Nothing had been built. Nothing had moved. The concrete was in...
Share this story Next time you get a window seat, look at the bottom of the window. There is a hole in it. A real one, drilled straight through, about the size of a pinhead.Most people who notice it assume one of two things: that it is damage, or that it is there to...
Share this story Count the engines on a Dornier Do 31 and you get to ten. Two of them are Pegasus turbofans, the same vectored-thrust engines that made the Harrier work. The other eight do nothing whatsoever in cruise. They sit in pods on the wingtips, four a side,...
Share this story On the morning of 12 May 1940, No. 12 Squadron was asked for volunteers. The target was a pair of bridges over the Albert Canal near Maastricht, across which the German Army was walking into Belgium. Everyone in the squadron volunteered.Five Fairey...
Share this story Ninety seconds before he put an Airbus A320 into a river, Chesley Sullenberger said something entirely ordinary. It was 3:26 in the afternoon on 15 January 2009, the aircraft was climbing away from LaGuardia, and he looked left out of the window....
Share this story The cargo compartment of a C-5A Galaxy is the size of a small warehouse. On the afternoon of 4 April 1975, the crew at Tan Son Nhut filled the lower deck of one with cardboard boxes, and into the boxes they put babies — two and three to a box,...
Share this story The radar worked. That was the strange part. It could see aircraft, track them, and hand the picture to the operators behind it. It simply could not do so reliably, or for long, or against the one category of target the entire programme existed to...
Share this story India’s largest fighter purchase in a generation is not stuck on money. It is not stuck on delivery dates, offsets, or how many aircraft get built in Nashik rather than Bordeaux. It is stuck on lines of code.New Delhi wants access to the...
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