Share this story Every test pilot who flew it seemed to reach for superlatives. One of the greatest aviators of the century called it outstanding. Another, a man who would later fly jets to the edge of control, called it simply the best aircraft he had ever flown. The...
Share this story When the founder of Britain’s leading aviation magazine first laid eyes on the Royal Air Force’s newest bomber in 1936, he needed only five words. The fuselage was tall, deep and barely a yard wide, and it reminded him of a piece of luggage. The name...
Share this story Of all the strange machines the Second World War produced, few are as gloriously, defiantly odd as the one a British engineer built in 1942: an ordinary army Jeep, bolted to a spinning rotor, meant to be towed into the sky behind a bomber and flown...
Share this story In American memory, the Brewster Buffalo is a punchline: a fat, underpowered little barrel of a fighter that was massacred at Midway and written off as one of the worst aircraft of the war. Its own pilots called it a flying coffin. Fly two thousand...
Share this story By 1952 the jet age had well and truly arrived. Swept-wing MiGs and Sabres were tearing across the skies of Korea at close to the speed of sound, and the propeller-driven fighter looked like a museum piece. Nobody told the Hawker Sea Fury. On a August...
Share this story For a few months, the world’s cheapest big airline flew the world’s trendiest long-haul jet. It did not last. IndiGo — India’s low-cost giant, and the largest airline in the country by a country mile — is tearing up its damp-lease deal...
Share this story On the afternoon of 24 June 1994, a 250-ton bomber wheeled around the control tower at Fairchild Air Force Base in a bank no B-52 was ever meant to hold. The left wing kept dropping — past 60 degrees, past 90 — until the giant simply...
Share this story Twenty minutes out of Memphis, First Officer Jim Tucker heard a sound he had never heard on an aeroplane: a metallic ring, again and again. It was a claw hammer coming down on the skull of his flight engineer. In the next few seconds a man would try...
Share this story On 24 November 1944, a bombardier lay over his bombsight five and a half miles above Tokyo, cross-hairs settled on the Nakajima engine works, and watched his bombs miss by a mile. Not because his aim was bad — because something invisible had...
Share this story Ask which fighter the RAF prized most in the last year of the Second World War and most people will say the Spitfire. They would be wrong. The aircraft that its pilots rated above all others — faster on the deck than a Spitfire, deadlier against...
Share this story Ask anyone to name Britain’s heavy bomber of the Second World War and they will say the Avro Lancaster — the Dam Busters’ mount, the star of every film and airshow flypast. Almost nobody says Handley Page Halifax. Yet the Halifax...
Share this story Most warplanes are lucky to see one war. The Douglas A-26 Invader saw three — World War II, Korea and Vietnam — the only American bomber ever to do so. Now one of these remarkable survivors has a new home: the Stockton Field Aviation...
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