Share this story At an airshow in December 1967, the Lockheed AH-56 Cheyenne did something helicopters were not supposed to do. It bowed. Landing on its two forward wheels, it dipped its nose to the crowd, then gently set its tail down and taxied away. The trick was...
Share this story On 3 July 1950, barely a week into the Korean War, Lieutenant JG Leonard Plog rolled his straight-winged jet onto the tail of a propeller-driven Yak-9 and squeezed the trigger. It was the first air-to-air kill ever scored by a US Navy jet, and it...
Share this story Ask anyone who served in Vietnam what the war sounded like, and many will give you the same answer: a rhythmic, chopping whop-whop-whop rolling in over the trees. It was the sound of the Bell UH-1 — the Huey — and depending on which end of...
Share this story It was three days after Christmas, 1972. A brand-new Lockheed L-1011 TriStar was on final approach to Miami with 176 people aboard when a tiny green light — the one confirming the nose landing gear was down and locked — failed to come on....
Share this story Thirteen minutes after leaving Birmingham on the morning of 10 June 1990, the pilots of British Airways Flight 5390 had loosened their shoulder straps and set breakfast on their laps. Then, with a bang like a bomb, the left cockpit windscreen tore...
Share this story In the late 1920s, a young man named Willard Custer watched a windstorm peel the roof off a barn. The roof did not slide forward and lift like an aircraft; it simply rose straight up as the wind screamed over it. Custer had a revelation that would...
Share this story In the first days of October 1973, Israel was losing. Egyptian and Syrian armies had struck on Yom Kippur, and Israeli tanks and aircraft were being destroyed faster than the country could replace them. Then, out of the western sky, came the sound of...
Share this story On 27 June 1969, a North American B-25 Mitchell lifted off from Fairbanks, Alaska, lost an engine moments later, and came down wheels-up on a sandbar in the middle of the Tanana River. Everyone walked away. The bomber did not. Recovering it would have...
Share this story On a warm Sunday afternoon in August 2024, a crimson-and-white flying boat the size of an airliner lifted off a lake on Vancouver Island for the last time. Tens of thousands of people lined the shore. Nine red Snowbirds jets slid into formation...
Share this story Look closely at the tail of the Spitfire and something is wrong — gloriously, deliberately wrong. Beside the familiar red-white-blue fin flash of the Royal Air Force sits a five-pointed communist red star. This is a British fighter, in British...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. Before the Enola Gay could take off from Tinian, the bomb had to reach Tinian — and the ship that carried it never came home. This is the story of USS Indianapolis: the secret cargo, the twelve...
Share this story An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our ten-part focus series. Part 9 flew the atomic missions; this piece goes back three months earlier, into the room where a handful of men decided which cities would live and which would die — and why the city...
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