Aviation World, History & Legends
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 consume the rest of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 salvation: the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 cost more than...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 alongside her. And a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 service, flying...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 minutes, the four...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
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 at the top of the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Imagine you are a fighter pilot who has just bailed out over a cold, heaving sea, far from land, with the enemy coast in sight. You are alone in the swell — until you hear engines, and a big, ungainly flying boat drops out of the sky, lands on the open ocean...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
On 11 June 1940, the people of Malta looked up at a sky suddenly full of Italian bombers and saw, rising to meet them, a handful of fabric-and-wire biplanes that looked like relics from the last war. They were relics. And for ten desperate days, they were all the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Picture a single dirt runway hacked out of a jungle, ringed by palm stumps and bomb craters, with a handful of battered fighters parked in the mud. Every day it was bombed. Some nights it was shelled by battleships. And from it, a scratch force of Marine, Navy and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There was a stretch of sky between India and China so lethal that the men who flew it said you could navigate by the wrecks below. They called it the Hump — and for three years, an unbroken stream of transport planes crossed the highest mountains on Earth, in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Part 9 of The Race for the Bomb, an Afterburner focus series. Everything in this series converges here: the physics of Part 1, the exiles of Part 2, the bomb of Part 5, the aircraft of Part 7, the fire doctrine of Part 8. Two missions, four days, one surrender....
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