Share this story On 30 May 1949, about 5,000 feet over Warwickshire, John Oliver Lancaster put an Armstrong Whitworth A.W.52 into a shallow dive and the aircraft began to shake. Not a buffet — a violent asymmetric flutter of the elevons and wingtip fins, roughly one...
Share this story On 9 April 1960, over a 5,000 km closed circuit, a Soviet airliner averaged 877.21 km/h. That is 545 mph. It was carrying up to 25 tonnes of payload, it had four engines turning eight propellers, and the record it set has never been beaten by any...
Share this story On the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib took a pre-production Heinkel He 219 up from Venlo against an RAF raid on Düsseldorf. Between 01:05 and 02:22 he claimed five bombers — four Halifaxes and a Lancaster, by the Smithsonian’s...
Share this story The aeroplane was eleven years old and had been sitting around for a decade racking up about 990 hours under a string of previous owners. It was a 1953 Cessna 180 — a single-engine, tailwheel, four-seat lightplane of the sort that fills small-town...
Share this story On 12 August 1976 a small blue-and-white jet lifted off from Venegono, north of Milan, with Aermacchi test pilot Franco Bonazzi at the controls. It was registered I-NOVE and it was not, by any measure, a revolutionary aeroplane. It was an old design...
Share this story Shortly after one in the morning on 26 August, residents of Kotovsk — a small town in Russia’s Tambov Oblast, some 430 kilometres southeast of Moscow — counted at least ten explosions. By dawn a smoke column stood over the town, and...
Share this story At five in the morning on Thursday, a door shaped like the front of a Boston townhouse swung open beside Gate C25 at Logan. Behind it: 12,000 square feet of wood panelling, copper trim, a replica of Fenway’s Green Monster and a hidden candy...
Share this story The number that follows the F-35 around got bigger again. In a fresh accounting delivered to Congress and confirmed by the programme office, the cost of buying America’s stealth fighter fleet has climbed by roughly $51 billion since late 2023 —...
Share this story Walk the halls of the IAA motor show in Munich and the story writes itself. Chinese cars everywhere, priced below anything a European maker can build, arriving in a market that spent a century assuming it owned the category.Now look at Jakarta, Dhaka,...
Share this story An MH-60 Black Hawk belonging to the US Army’s most secretive aviation unit went down in the Colorado foothills on Tuesday. All four crew walked away.The helicopter came down in wooded terrain on the eastern side of Thorodin Mountain, north of...
Share this story The Pentagon announced on Tuesday that Raytheon and Boeing had picked up contracts worth up to a combined $766 million tied to the B-52 Radar Modernization Program.It is a substantial sum for a programme whose central task is replacing one radar with...
Share this story Britain has spent three years shipping Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine. It has now agreed to something rather more consequential: letting Ukraine help build them.Ahead of Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s visit to Kyiv on 24 August, London...
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