Share this story Just after midnight on August 1, 2026, an Airbus A350-900 lifted off from Taipei and pointed its nose at Central Europe. In the left-hand seat sat K.W. Chang — not a rostered captain, but the chairman of the airline, flying his own inaugural....
Share this story Chinese state television does not show its most sensitive hardware by accident. So when the final episode of the CCTV documentary Zhisheng (“Victory”) aired on August 4, 2026, one sequence was clearly meant to be seen: an H-6N bomber...
Share this story An artificial-intelligence agent just strapped into a fighter, stared at an enemy jet through an infrared eye, and ran it down twenty-seven times — and no human touched the stick.Lockheed Martin Skunk Works pulled the curtain back on August 4,...
Share this story Its own crews called it “the Beast.” Less politely, they said the letters SB2C stood for “Son of a Bitch, 2nd Class.” An MIT professor who studied a model of it in a wind tunnel declared that anyone who built more than one...
Share this story On the morning of 4 June 1942, forty-one obsolete torpedo bombers lumbered off three American carriers toward the Japanese fleet. Their aircraft were too slow, their torpedoes barely worked, and most of them had no fighter escort. Within an hour, all...
Share this story Eric “Winkle” Brown flew more different types of aircraft than any human being who has ever lived — nearly five hundred of them, from Spitfires to jets to captured German rocket planes. And of all of them, the one he wrote about with...
Share this story Every test pilot who flew it seemed to reach for superlatives. One of the greatest aviators of the century called it outstanding. Another, a man who would later fly jets to the edge of control, called it simply the best aircraft he had ever flown. The...
Share this story When the founder of Britain’s leading aviation magazine first laid eyes on the Royal Air Force’s newest bomber in 1936, he needed only five words. The fuselage was tall, deep and barely a yard wide, and it reminded him of a piece of luggage. The name...
Share this story The Bell P-39 Airacobra was, by common American opinion, a disappointment. Underpowered at altitude, saddled with a fearsome reputation, it was the fighter U.S. airmen sang rude songs about. And yet it enabled a single pilot to shoot down more enemy...
Share this story Of all the strange machines the Second World War produced, few are as gloriously, defiantly odd as the one a British engineer built in 1942: an ordinary army Jeep, bolted to a spinning rotor, meant to be towed into the sky behind a bomber and flown...
Share this story By the summer of 1944, German fighter pilots on the Eastern Front had learned to read the sky for a particular silhouette: small, blunt-nosed, impossibly nimble. When they saw it low over the battlefield, their orders were blunt. Do not fight it down...
Share this story In American memory, the Brewster Buffalo is a punchline: a fat, underpowered little barrel of a fighter that was massacred at Midway and written off as one of the worst aircraft of the war. Its own pilots called it a flying coffin. Fly two thousand...
Recent Comments