Share this story She would climb to around four thousand metres, roll the Stuka onto its back, and put it into a near-vertical dive to test the brakes and the sight she had helped design. Then she would do it again. On a good day, fifteen times. Melitta von...
Share this story By the summer of 1944 the Fifteenth Air Force had lost 350 bombers over the Ploiesti oil fields, and a great many of the men who fell out of them came down in occupied Serbia. They were not captured. They were hidden — in barns, in hayricks, in...
Share this story On the night of 30 March 1944, RAF Bomber Command sent 795 heavy bombers to Nuremberg. Ninety-six of them never came home. In a single night, in a few hours over Germany, more than 500 young airmen were killed — the worst night the Command...
Share this story On the morning of 21 March 1945, twenty de Havilland Mosquitos came in over Copenhagen at rooftop height, so low that Danes on the streets could see the crews’ faces. Their target was the Shellhus — the Gestapo’s headquarters in the...
Share this story Late in the afternoon of April 18, 1943 — Palm Sunday — a wall of German transport planes crawled north-east across the Mediterranean at wavetop height, so low their propellers kicked spray off the swells. There were about ninety of them,...
Share this story A French-built fighter took on fuel from a Chinese tanker over Egypt this week — and in doing so quietly rewrote a small piece of the aerial map. It is, as far as anyone can tell, the first time a Chinese Y-20 tanker has been publicly documented...
Share this story Volodymyr Zelensky spent the first day of September addressing an audience that is not usually on a wartime president’s list: airline schedulers, flight-planning departments and, pointedly, the underwriters who insure them. In a video address on...
Share this story At 3:58 on the afternoon of 29 May 1951, a red P-51 Mustang lifted off from Bardufoss in northern Norway with one man in it and no radio navigation aids ahead of him worth the name. Charles Blair was going to fly over the North Pole to Alaska, alone,...
Share this story At 4:17 in the afternoon on 4 April 1977, a first officer named Lyman Keele said nine words into a cockpit voice recorder that would be played back for decades afterwards. “Bill, you’ve got to find me a highway.” His DC-9 had no...
Share this story At 3:48 in the afternoon on 20 October 1986, two minutes from touchdown at Kuibyshev, the captain of a Soviet airliner asked his flight engineer to pull the curtains across the cockpit windows. The Tupolev Tu-134 had them fitted for training: draw...
Share this story When Bud Anderson died in May 2024 at the age of 102, America lost the last of a vanishing breed: a World War II triple ace, a man who shot down enemy aircraft in the skies over Europe and lived to tell the story for eighty years. He flew a P-51...
Share this story Before he was a reclusive billionaire, before the movies and the mania, Howard Hughes was a young man obsessed with going fast. In 1935 that obsession took the shape of a single, gorgeous silver aeroplane — the Hughes H-1 Racer — and with...
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