Share this story On the afternoon of 4 December 1950, a Navy fighter pilot looked down at a burning wreck on a frozen North Korean mountainside and made a decision his own training told him not to make. His wingman was alive, trapped in the cockpit, and smoke was...
Share this story Bushire, on the Persian Gulf, December 1931. An American pilot is working on his biplane when a battered Ford rolls out of the desert. In it, half-buried in dust, is a young woman looking for a mechanic. Her own aircraft is stranded up the coast with...
Share this story A ballistic missile submarine on patrol wants to stay deep and silent. That makes it hard to talk to: ordinary radio waves barely penetrate seawater. The US Navy’s answer, since the 1960s, has been an aircraft that unreels a wire antenna several...
Share this story The photographs look like any official handover: dark suits, a red rope barrier, a framed certificate held up for the cameras. Behind the smiling delegation, though, stands a grey-and-white fighter with the Ethiopian tricolour on its twin tails. On...
Share this story Airline seat maps quote a number most passengers never think about until their knees meet the seat in front: seat pitch. It is the closest thing the industry has to a measure of how much room you get, and it is also widely misunderstood. Pitch is not...
Share this story In 1960 and 1961, thirteen American women pilots went through the same punishing medical tests used to pick the Mercury Seven astronauts. They swallowed rubber tubes, had ice water poured into their ears and pedalled weighted bicycles to exhaustion....
Share this story On the afternoon of 22 September 1980, Iraqi jets swept across the border and bombed Iranian air bases, including Tehran’s Mehrabad airport. The aim was to destroy Iran’s air force on the ground. It did not work. Iranian hardened shelters...
Share this story A little before one o’clock in the morning on 6 September 2007, a single word came over the radio in an Israeli Air Force command post: “Arizona”. It meant that a building in the desert of eastern Syria, a building the Israelis...
Share this story For the first time in 44 years, a brand-new fighter type wears the maple leaf. On 22 October 2026 the Royal Canadian Air Force took delivery of its first two CF-35A Lightning IIs at Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, and announced the news on social media...
Share this story On 27 October 1954, a 41-year-old colonel working at Far East Air Forces headquarters in Tokyo was promoted to brigadier general. With that single star, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became the first African-American general in the United States Air Force, 72...
Share this story More than three in four European airline pilots say they have nodded off at the controls at least once in the past month. That is the headline finding of a new report published on 26 October 2026 by the European Cockpit Association (ECA), the...
Share this story On 3 July 1936, Short Brothers’ chief test pilot John Lankester Parker took a brand-new flying boat out onto the River Medway at Rochester for what was meant to be nothing more than taxi trials. The big silver hull handled so well that Parker...
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