Share this story In the autumn of 1996, a jet took off from a secret airfield in the Nevada desert that looked less like an aircraft and more like a prop from a science-fiction film. Faceless, tailless, hunched, its single engine hidden inside its spine, it slipped...
Share this story Picture a fighter shaped like a dinner plate. Not a sleek dart, not a graceful sweep of wings — a fat, near-circular disc with a bubble canopy stuck on top and two enormous propellers windmilling at the tips. It looks like something that should be...
Share this story On 13 October 1954, a Royal Navy pilot named Lieutenant B.D. Macfarlane was catapulted off the carrier HMS Albion when his engine died. His aircraft flopped into the sea directly ahead of the ship, which then ran straight over it, slicing the fighter...
Share this story Some aircraft are beautiful. The Blackburn Beverley was not one of them. It looked like a shipping container that had grown four propellers and a pair of tails and decided to fly anyway — a slab-sided barn of an aeroplane with its wheels bolted...
Share this story Tens of thousands of Axis prisoners spent the Second World War behind Allied wire. Exactly one of them broke out, crossed an ocean, and made it all the way back to his own side to fly again. His name was Franz von Werra, and the film they made about...
Share this story Head-on, the Fairey Gannet looked like something a committee had argued about and lost. A deep, humpbacked fuselage, a chin full of radar, and a nose crowded with eight spinning propeller blades stacked in two counter-rotating discs. It is one of the...
Share this story From the front it looked like the future: a big, twin-boom jet with a needle nose and no visible cockpit canopy where you would expect one. The de Havilland Sea Vixen was one of the most futuristic fighters the Royal Navy ever flew. It was also one of...
Share this story In the 1950s the U.S. Navy watched the Air Force build a fleet of long-range bombers to carry the nation’s nuclear deterrent — and decided it wanted in. Its answer was one of the strangest and most beautiful warplanes America ever built: a...
Share this story On 24 July, a rule two decades in the making rewrote what counts as a light-sport aircraft in America — and, with it, what a beginner pilot is allowed to fly. MOSAIC, the Modernization of Special Airworthiness Certification, tears up the...
Share this story For four years a quiet turf war has run between the companies building 5G networks and the people who land airplanes. On 24 July, the FAA moved to end it. The agency is issuing a final rule requiring aircraft radio altimeters to shrug off interference...
Share this story In 1943, a 33-year-old engineer promised the US Army Air Forces a jet fighter in 180 days. He rented a circus tent, pitched it beside a foul-smelling plastics factory in Burbank, sealed off a handful of hand-picked engineers, and delivered the XP-80...
Share this story It shot down more enemy aircraft than any other Allied fighter of the First World War — and it killed a horrifying number of the young men sent up to fly it, before they ever met a German. The Sopwith Camel was the finest dogfighter of 1917 and...
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