In 1969 the Chinese air force asked for a fighter small enough to be carried on the back of a truck. The idea was that in a war on Chinese soil, airfields would be bombed flat within days. What survived would be whatever could be hidden, dispersed and flown off short...
On 21 August 1963 a Tupolev Tu-124 ran out of fuel over the middle of Leningrad, glided for fourteen seconds, cleared a bridge, and landed on the River Neva without killing anybody. A tug that happened to be towing a raft of timber past the spot cast off, came...
Somewhere between Bangkok and Hong Kong, at nine thousand feet off the coast of Hainan, the co-pilot of a Cathay Pacific airliner called for blankets. Two fighters were shooting at them. Cedric Carlton had the surviving passengers hang the blankets behind their seats....
In 1965 the Republic of China Air Force built two graves at the Bitan military cemetery outside Taipei. One was for Major Yeh Changti, the other for Major Chang Liyi. Both men had been shot down over communist China. Both had been declared dead. The Central Daily News...
On 12 September 1958, the Soviet Union told the United States that it had found the wreck of an American aeroplane in Armenia, and that from the remains discovered there it might be assumed that six crewmen had perished. Seventeen men had been on board. A week later,...
On 4 December 1956, an Italian test pilot pointed a small silver aeroplane downhill from above 40,000 feet and became the first man to take an Italian-designed, Italian-built aircraft through the sound barrier. The aircraft was the Aerfer Sagittario 2. Two were built....
On 30 July 1970, four Israeli Mirages flew a routine photo-reconnaissance profile over the Gulf of Suez. They climbed to 35,000 feet, made the standard radio calls, and flew in a formation so tight that Soviet radar operators read four aircraft as two. They were not...
Stuart Anderson MP asked a dull question in July and got a dull answer in September. Buried in it is the clearest picture anyone has yet published of where Britain’s next fighter is actually being built — and a small arithmetic problem. The Future Combat...
Last week a volunteer-run space programme in Rancho Cordova, California, released some pictures. They show a dark, wing-shaped vehicle called Hazel dropping away from twin balloons joined by a long truss, high above the Earth. They are stills from an animation. There...
DL234 pushed back from JFK Terminal 4 on Sunday afternoon and landed at Ben Gurion on Monday morning. An Airbus A330-900neo, 281 seats, ten and three quarter hours eastbound. It is an entirely ordinary flight, and it had not operated since 28 February. That was the...
At 12:45 on Sunday afternoon, Polish controllers pulled a slice of airspace east of Lublin out of civil use. At 13:15, Poland’s Operational Command announced that an unidentified object had crossed from the direction of Belarus. A duty Mi-24 was already on its...
On Sunday morning, Iranian state television announced that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had struck a remotely operated US military vessel in the Strait of Hormuz, after it tried to enter what Iran calls a restricted area. By Sunday afternoon, US Central...
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