The Air and Space Museum Turns 50 — and Opens Five New Galleries Today
Fifty years ago today — on 1 July 1976 — the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum opened its doors on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It was a bicentennial gift to a nation that had just landed men on the Moon, won a Space Race, and built an...
The AC-130: A Cargo Plane With More Guns Than a Destroyer
In September 1967, an ungainly four-engine turboprop lumbered off the runway at Nha Trang Air Base in South Vietnam. It looked like any other C-130 Hercules — the workhorse cargo plane that had been hauling troops, ammunition, and jeeps across theatre since the early...
Three Exocets That Terrified the Royal Navy
Argentina went to war in the Falklands in April 1982 with five air-launched Exocet missiles. Five. That was the entire stock — France had delivered the AM39 variant along with a handful of Super Étendard strike fighters just months before the conflict began, and the...
S7’s Boeing 737 Slides Into Siberian Mud — Days After Banning Co-Pilots From Landing
An S7 Airlines Boeing 737-800 slid off the end of the runway at Mirny Airport in Russia’s Sakha Republic on June 30, coming to rest in mud beyond the paved surface. All 173 passengers and six crew members walked away without injury. But the incident — classified...
The Most Expensive Aircraft That Never Made It
Share this story Every aircraft on this list looked, on paper, like a brilliant idea. Each had serious money, serious engineering and serious ambition behind it. And each ended the same way: cancelled, scrapped or quietly buried after burning through a fortune,...
The Fighter With No Guns Up Front
Share this story Picture a fighter that cannot shoot straight ahead. No guns in the nose, none in the wings — nothing the pilot can aim simply by pointing the aircraft. Instead, all four machine guns sit in a powered turret behind the cockpit, worked by a second...
The Manta Ray That Broke the Speed Record
Share this story Look at it from above and the name explains itself. The Douglas F4D was a broad, tailless delta with gently rounded wingtips — the silhouette of a manta ray gliding through water. The Navy called it the Skyray. The pilots, with magnificent...
The Three-Engine Jet That America Forgot
Share this story Count the engines. Most jets have two, or four. The Martin XB-51 had three — two slung under the nose in pods, and a third buried in the tail, breathing through an intake at the base of the fin. It is one of the strangest combat aircraft the...
Alaska and Hawaiian Hit 150 Starlink Jets
Share this story The Wi-Fi on your next Alaska or Hawaiian flight may now be faster than the connection in your living room. Alaska Air Group says roughly 150 of its aircraft are flying with SpaceX’s Starlink internet — and for a lot of passengers, it is...
The Greyhound Flies Its Last Carrier Landing
Share this story For sixty years, one of the most welcome sounds on an American aircraft carrier was not a fighter. It was the drone of two big turboprops on approach. The C-2 Greyhound brought the mail, the spare parts, the fresh food, and the sailors heading home on...
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