Share this story When people picture the first practical helicopters, they usually think of Igor Sikorsky and wartime America. But years before Sikorsky’s machines matured, Nazi Germany built a genuinely usable transport helicopter — and in September 1945,...
Share this story Germany went into the Second World War without a modern four-engine heavy bomber, and it spent much of the war failing to build one. The aircraft meant to fix that — the Heinkel He 177 Greif — had four engines but only two propellers, a...
Share this story Russia’s aircraft industry has settled into a wartime rhythm, and on 27 August 2026 it produced another familiar bulletin. The United Aircraft Corporation announced that a fresh batch of Su-35S fighters had been handed to the Russian Aerospace...
Share this story Look quickly and you might call it a Sabre. Look again and the differences pile up: a fatter fuselage, twin-wheel landing gear, cannon in the nose, and — strangest of all — no air intake at the front. This was the North American YF-93, a...
Share this story On 6 August 1969, a Soviet helicopter lifted 40,204.5 kilograms — just over 40 tonnes — to a height of 2,255 metres. That is roughly the weight of a loaded articulated lorry, carried straight up by rotors. No helicopter has lifted more, before or...
Share this story A jet aeroplane hovering ten feet above a runway is doing something aerodynamically absurd. There is no airflow over the wings, so the control surfaces do nothing. The only things keeping it upright are puffs of compressed air from nozzles at the...
Share this story On the night of 11/12 June 1943, Major Werner Streib took a pre-production Heinkel He 219 up from Venlo against an RAF raid on Düsseldorf. Between 01:05 and 02:22 he claimed five bombers — four Halifaxes and a Lancaster, by the Smithsonian’s...
Share this story The next single-aisle airliner has a geometry problem, and Boeing has quietly patented one answer to it. The problem is simple to state. The most promising engine architecture for the 2030s — the open fan — has a rotor roughly twice the...
Share this story An Airbus A330 of that weight should touch down at about 135 knots. On 13 April 2010, Cathay Pacific 780 arrived at Hong Kong at 231 knots — with both thrust levers at idle, one engine stuck at seventy percent power, the other stuck below idle,...
Share this story Everybody who knows anything about the Antonov An-2 knows the same thing about it: that the flight manual has no stall speed, and that if the engine quits you simply hold the stick back and the aeroplane parachutes gently to earth at 40 km/h. It is a...
Share this story In 1937 Focke-Wulf flew a fighter that was roughly 80 km/h faster than the Messerschmitt Bf 109 then in service, using exactly the same engines. It had twice the range. It weighed twice as much and still outran the thing it was compared against. Nine...
Share this story Put two engines in a fighter and you normally end up with something like a Bf 110: two nacelles, one on each wing, and an aeroplane that is bigger than the thing it is trying to shoot down. Kawasaki tried a different answer. They put one engine in...
Recent Comments