Share this story Grumman built the F8F Bearcat around one brutal idea: take the biggest engine America had and wrap the smallest possible aeroplane around it. The result was less a fighter than an engine with a saddle — an 18-cylinder radial hauling a...
Share this story In the 1930s the Atlantic was aviation’s unconquered ocean. Airships had crossed it, but no commercial heavier-than-air machine could carry paying cargo the whole way in a single hop. The physics was brutally simple: a flying boat heavy enough...
Share this story For most of the last thirty years, the answer to “who builds America’s fighter jets?” was almost boringly simple. Lockheed Martin built the stealth fighters, and everyone else competed for what was left. Then, in the space of about...
Share this story For twenty years the Atlantic had been killing balloonists. Since 1958, five men had died trying to drift across it, and every attempt — more than a dozen of them — had ended in the sea. Then, in August 1978, three amateurs from Albuquerque climbed...
Share this story In 1935 the Soviet Union built the largest aircraft on Earth — an eight-engined giant with a wingspan to rival a modern Boeing 747, fitted out not with weapons but with a printing press, a photographic lab, a telephone exchange, a cinema, and a radio...
Share this story A little over a year before he became the first human being to set foot on another world, Neil Armstrong very nearly died a mile from his own desk — in one of the strangest, ugliest flying machines NASA ever built. On 6 May 1968, he ejected from the...
Share this story At 11:20 on the morning of 25 January 1966, a Lockheed test pilot named Bill Weaver lifted an SR-71 Blackbird off the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. Beside him, in the reconnaissance systems officer’s seat, sat Jim Zwayer. A few hours later,...
Share this story On 30 July 2026, India’s government told Parliament something that, more than a year after the Air India 171 disaster, only makes the central mystery harder to solve: the Boeing 787’s fuel control switches — the very components at the...
Share this story Some warplanes make their name in dogfights, twisting through the sky with guns blazing. The McDonnell F-101 Voodoo made most of its name doing the opposite: flying low, flying flat out, and flying completely unarmed straight over the people trying to...
Share this story Every so often aviation history throws up an aircraft whose greatest achievement was simply existing. The Bell P-59 Airacomet is the patron saint of that club. It was America’s first jet aircraft, a genuine milestone, and yet it was so...
Share this story Most military aircraft can be summed up in a single job. Fighters fight. Bombers bomb. Attack helicopters attack. And then there is the Mil Mi-24, a machine that looked at the neat little boxes military planners like to draw and cheerfully refused to...
Share this story Ask anyone who was there and they will tell you the same thing: you heard it before you saw it. A low, chopping pulse rolling in over the treeline, whop-whop-whop, growing until it filled the whole sky. For a generation of soldiers, that sound meant...
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