Share this story Somewhere on the ramp at Paine Field in Washington State sit rows of enormous, finished airliners with nowhere to go. They are Boeing 777Xs — the biggest twinjets ever built — and most of them have never carried a paying passenger. In 2026 they are...
Share this story Tomorrow, as America’s 250th birthday flyovers thunder across the country, watch for the moment the crowd goes quiet. Four jets approach in perfect formation — and then one pulls up, streaming away from the others, climbing alone toward...
Share this story On 7 August 1942, over an island the Americans had invaded that very morning, a .30-calibre bullet passed through Saburō Sakai’s skull. It blinded his right eye and paralysed his left side. He was 560 nautical miles from home, alone, at war, in...
Share this story On 21 May 1995, on a frozen lake 280 miles north of Thule, Greenland, a B-29 Superfortress that had not moved in forty-eight years swung onto its makeshift ice runway under its own power. Four rebuilt engines ran sweetly. Half a century of Arctic...
Share this story Just after eight on the morning of 29 April 1975, American Radio Service in Saigon interrupted its programming to announce that the temperature was “105 degrees and rising.” Then it played White Christmas. In a city where it never snows,...
Share this story For three decades during the Cold War, Britain’s nuclear deterrent rested on the wings of three extraordinary aircraft: the Vickers Valiant, the Avro Vulcan, and the Handley Page Victor. Known collectively as the V-bombers, they were designed to...
Share this story The Handley Page Victor was the last and most advanced of Britain’s three V-bombers — and the one with the longest career. Designed to carry nuclear weapons to Moscow at high altitude, it outlived its original mission by decades, reinventing...
Share this story For more than half a century, the Boeing 747 was the largest and most recognisable commercial aircraft on Earth. From its first flight in 1969 to its final delivery in January 2023, the “Queen of the Skies” carried billions of passengers,...
Share this story Twenty Sea Harriers sailed south with the Royal Navy task force in April 1982. None of them should have survived. The Argentine Air Force outnumbered them five to one, flew faster jets, and operated from concrete runways while the British pilots...
A Marine Corps MV-22B Osprey aboard a Navy amphibious assault ship. The tiltrotor has replaced the CH-46 Sea Knight in the assault role and the C-2 Greyhound in the carrier delivery role. (U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons) The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey was supposed to...
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...
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...
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