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...
Share this story Some stories are too strange to stay in the news cycle. On Friday, the strangest aviation story of the summer becomes a Netflix documentary. The streamer has fast-tracked a film about the afternoon in July when the President of the United States...
Share this story On 5 November 1938 three Royal Air Force bombers took off from Ismailia in Egypt and turned east. Two of them landed at Darwin in northern Australia about forty-eight hours later, having flown roughly 7,150 miles without stopping. It was a world...
Share this story On 10 June 1965, a British airliner full of fare-paying passengers came down the approach to a runway and landed without either pilot touching the controls. It was the first automatic landing by a civil airliner in scheduled passenger service, and it...
Share this story Between May and August 1972, an F-4 Phantom pilot from Reidsville, North Carolina was credited with shooting down five MiG-21s over North Vietnam. Every one fell to the AIM-7 Sparrow, a radar-guided missile with a reputation so poor that crews joked...
Share this story Stand behind a jet at full power and the experience is less like hearing a machine than being shoved by one. A modern airliner engine can produce more than 100,000 pounds of thrust from a device with essentially no reciprocating parts — just a...
Share this story Kelly Johnson gave the Skunk Works the SR-71 and the U-2. But it was his successor, a chubby, wisecracking thermodynamicist named Ben Rich, who took an idea most engineers thought was absurd — an aircraft you couldn’t see on radar —...
Share this story Here is a problem every fighter pilot eventually faces: you are behind an enemy jet, you have the advantage — and you are going too fast. Keep pulling and you will rocket right past him, handing him your tail. Ease off and he escapes. The...
Share this story Some aircraft are remembered for what they did. The McDonnell F3H Demon is remembered for what it led to. Underpowered, dangerous in its early years, and saddled with one of the worst engines in naval-aviation history, the Demon nonetheless taught its...
Share this story He never became a general, never commanded a wing, and spent much of his career infuriating his superiors. Yet John Boyd may have shaped modern air combat more than any pilot who ever lived. He rewrote how fighters are flown, how they are designed,...
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