History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story At 7:26 on the morning of New Year’s Day 1929, a fat, three-engined Fokker lifted off from a field near Los Angeles and simply refused to come down. For the next six days, seven hours and forty minutes, it stayed in the air — sleeping,...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The photographs are almost hard to believe: Wellingtons limping home with whole sections of fuselage burned or shot away, the fabric skin hanging in ribbons and the aircraft’s metal skeleton showing through like the bones of a fish. And still...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It had a propeller at the back, a nose that tilted up to lob its cannon shells, and a seat that dropped its pilot out through the belly in an emergency so he would not be chopped to pieces by his own engine. It was nearly as long as a DC-3. And it was...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 7 told the engineering story of the B-29 — the pressurised cabin, the burning engines, the Battle of Kansas. This piece asks the question that story leaves hanging: how did America...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Part 8 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Part 7 left the three-billion-dollar B-29 failing at high altitude. This part is about the man who turned it around, the night that followed, and the sixty-plus cities after that. It is not...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story In the 1960s, the United States built a space station whose true purpose was so secret that the men chosen to fly it could not tell their own families what they did. The cover story was research — testing whether astronauts could be useful in...
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