Share this story Shortly before midnight on 14 May 1982, Royal Navy Sea Kings clattered in low over the dark, wind-scoured grass of a small island north of West Falkland. Out of them climbed about 45 men of D Squadron, 22 Special Air Service, each loaded with mortar...
Share this story In the last week of January 1991, American AWACS crews over the Gulf watched something nobody had predicted. Iraqi jets were taking off, staying low and running hard, not towards the coalition and not towards friendly Jordan, but east, towards Iran....
Share this story Somewhere over Bedfordshire on an October afternoon, an easyJet Airbus and a Jet2 Boeing slide past each other at 35,000 feet, their contrails crossing in a giant X. Their safety does not depend on spotting each other. It depends on a number both...
Share this story On 10 January 1956, ground crews in Turkey and West Germany let go of the first nine of hundreds of giant plastic balloons. Each one carried a camera gondola about the size of a refrigerator. The cover story said they were studying the weather. In...
Share this story It is the middle of the night over stormy country, and the windscreen of a KC-135 Stratotanker suddenly fills with light. Violet and blue tendrils branch across the glass like living lightning, crawling and flickering, while the instruments glow...
Share this story On 14 April 1956, three silver jets climbed out of Thule, Greenland, and turned towards the top of the world. Their pilots were heading for Noril’sk, a closed Soviet nickel-mining city 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle. Two air refuellings...
Share this story Behind the painted nose cone of almost every airliner sits a flat disc about the size of a dustbin lid, nodding up and down and sweeping left and right, all flight long. It is the weather radar, and on a summer night over the Alps or the Gulf of...
Share this story Four hundred feet above a moonlit field in occupied France, a bomber painted glossy black slows to just above stalling speed. Below, three flashlights in a row and a fourth at a right angle mark the spot. In the belly, a man in a padded jump suit sits...
Share this story Snow is falling on a dark winter morning, and your airliner has not moved from the de-icing pad. A truck with a cherry-picker basket rolls alongside and a worker blasts the wings with a steaming orange liquid. Minutes later comes a second pass, this...
Share this story On the evening of 9 July 1918, a small yellow biplane appeared out of the south over Edmonton, Alberta, following the railway line up from Calgary. In the cockpit sat a 27-year-old American woman. In a mailbag beside her were 259 letters, the first...
Share this story Just before four o’clock on the afternoon of 23 June 1952, US Navy Skyraiders tipped into their dives over the Yalu River. Below them sat the Sui-ho Dam, one of the biggest hydroelectric plants on earth. Across the river, less than 40 miles...
Share this story Stand at the end of a runway and watch an airliner come in to land, and you will see its wings rise gently from the fuselage into a shallow V. Now watch a US Marine Corps Harrier hover over the same runway. Its wings do the opposite: they droop from...
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