Share this story The runway at RAF Lyneham on the morning of 22 July 1966 held one of the least likely aeroplanes in Britain: a Lightning interceptor with no canopy, a disarmed ejection seat, its undercarriage pinned down, and a man in the cockpit who was wearing no...
Share this story Watch a Boeing 777X fly and something looks almost alarming: the wings bend. A lot. In gusty air the tips ride metres above where they sit on the ground, flexing like a diving board. Passengers new to it sometimes gasp. But that enormous flex is not a...
Share this story The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has been in service for seventy years and is on course to fly for a hundred. It has outlasted the Soviet Union, the propeller, and most of the engineers who designed it. And the design that made all of that possible...
Share this story The Short Stirling was the first of the RAF’s great four-engine heavy bombers — into service before the Halifax, before the Lancaster, the aircraft that opened Britain’s strategic bombing war. It was huge, handsome and, in the end,...
Share this story In 1935 a newspaper baron dared British industry to build the fastest civil aircraft in Europe. The result was so quick that when the Royal Air Force turned it into a bomber, it could outrun its own fighters. Two years later that same design flew the...
Share this story The Blackburn Skua was slow, awkward and asked to do two jobs it could not both do well. It has been mocked ever since as one of the Fleet Air Arm’s worst fighters. And yet in the first months of the Second World War this unloved machine scored...
Share this story Nobody ever called the Fairey Barracuda beautiful. With its high shoulder-mounted wing, spindly legs and a clutter of struts and flaps hanging beneath it, the Fleet Air Arm’s torpedo and dive bomber looked like it had been assembled from spare...
Share this story In the spring of 1942 the brand-new Avro Lancaster had barely gone to war when Bomber Command sent twelve of them on a mission that bordered on suicidal: fly in broad daylight, at treetop height, a thousand miles across occupied Europe to bomb a...
Share this story On November 6, 1945, an American fighter turned onto final approach to a small escort carrier off California when its engine quit. The pilot did not bail out. He kept coming, touched down, and caught a wire — and in doing so made the first...
Share this story The most famous British bomber of the Second World War began life as one of its worst. Before the Avro Lancaster hauled bouncing bombs to the Ruhr dams and Tallboys onto the Tirpitz, there was the Avro Manchester — a twin-engine heavy so plagued...
Share this story Three months after Pearl Harbor, two enormous Japanese flying boats lifted off from a lagoon in the Marshall Islands and set course for Hawaii. Their plan was almost absurd: fly nearly 2,000 miles across empty ocean, meet a submarine at a deserted...
Share this story Two years ago Riyadh Air was a logo and a promise. This week it flew its first passengers to Bangkok — the newest thread in a network that Saudi Arabia intends to stretch across the planet.On September 2, the kingdom’s from-scratch flag...
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