History & Legends, Military Aviation
On a moonless night in 1942, an RAF bomber crossing the Dutch coast flew into a wall it could not see. There was no barrier in the sky — only an invisible grid of radar beams, searchlights and waiting fighters, each box of it engineered to catch one aircraft at a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The F-104 Starfighter has one of the worst reputations in military aviation. Germany bought 916 of them, lost 292, and buried 116 pilots. The Luftwaffe called it the Witwenmacher — the Widowmaker.On one night in January 1982, that aircraft did something no other...
Aviation World, Military Aviation
In 2025 the world spent $2,887 billion on its armed forces. That is the highest figure SIPRI has ever recorded, the eleventh consecutive annual increase, and it works out at $352 for every person alive.Below is what that money bought, counted as carefully as open...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Count the engines on a Dornier Do 31 and you get to ten. Two of them are Pegasus turbofans, the same vectored-thrust engines that made the Harrier work. The other eight do nothing whatsoever in cruise. They sit in pods on the wingtips, four a side, pointing at the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The radar worked. That was the strange part. It could see aircraft, track them, and hand the picture to the operators behind it. It simply could not do so reliably, or for long, or against the one category of target the entire programme existed to detect.On 18...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin in February 1938. The arena is packed. Down on the floor sits a contraption that looks like a light trainer that has lost its wings and grown two enormous three-blade fans on outrigger struts. A slight young woman climbs into the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
By 1943 the arithmetic over Germany had turned against the Luftwaffe. American daylight bomber streams — the tight, mutually-defending boxes of B-17s and B-24s — were arriving in numbers that piston fighters could not blunt fast enough. Blohm & Voss...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Few aircraft have been asked to carry as much mythology on so little lift as the Sack AS-6. Search the phrase ‘Nazi flying saucer’ and this stubby, disc-winged machine appears again and again, presented as evidence that the Third Reich was on the verge of...
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