Flying Tigers Contract: How America Hired Mercenaries in 1941
Share this story On paper, the men who flew for the American Volunteer Group in 1941 were carpenters, musicians, bankers, students and clergymen. One was a stonemason. Claire Chennault, the man who commanded them, travelled on a passport that described him as a...
Sully Sullenberger on His Alzheimer’s Diagnosis
Share this story Chesley Sullenberger has spent the seventeen years since the Hudson being careful about one thing above all: refusing to let the story be about him alone. He has pushed it back towards the crew, the cabin staff, the ferry captains, the training, the...
North Korea Shows Its Drone Production Lines, Not Just Its Drones
Share this story North Korea does not usually show you the factory. It shows you the parade, the launch, the finished missile on the transporter, and then the cameras go away. So when Rodong Sinmun published photographs on Saturday of Kim Jong Un walking through drone...
Luxembourg Airport Shut for a Night by Unidentified Drones
Share this story Friday evening, around nine o’clock, somebody flew something over Luxembourg Airport that had no business being there. Within minutes the busiest cargo hub in the Grand Duchy had stopped moving aircraft altogether. The suspension lasted through the...
Constance Babington Smith: The Woman Who Found the V-1
Share this story The object was less than a millimetre long on the print. It sat on a photograph of a sandy peninsula in the Baltic, among thousands of other specks, and a woman in a Buckinghamshire country house looked at it through a magnifying glass and worked out...
The El Al Captain Who Dived to Beat a Hijacking
Share this story The decision that saved El Al Flight 219 was not the dive. It was made on the ground at Schiphol, before anyone boarded, and it nearly cost the captain his career. On 6 September 1970 a Boeing 707 left Amsterdam for New York with 138 passengers and 10...
Harry Hawker: The Mechanic Who Gave Hawker Its Name
Share this story Hawker Aircraft built the Hurricane, the Typhoon, the Tempest, the Hunter and the Harrier. The name is stamped on some of the most important aeroplanes Britain ever produced. It is not the name of a British aristocrat or an engineer knighted for it....
One Fighter Pilot in Congress: August Pfluger Wants Wingmen
Share this story There are 96 military veterans in the United States Congress. Forty-five served in the Army, twenty-four in the Navy, twelve in the Marine Corps and fifteen in the Air Force. Of those fifteen, exactly one flew fighters. Rep. August Pfluger of Texas...
NewsChopper4: Three Killed in Chatsworth Helicopter Crash
Share this story There were several news helicopters over Chatsworth on the evening of 15 September. A Metro bus and an SUV had collided in the west San Fernando Valley and people had died, so the aircraft that cover Los Angeles from above had gathered, as they do....
Space Force Electronic Warfare: A Guardian Under Missile Fire
Share this story She had been in the Space Force for two years. She was somewhere in the Middle East, at a console, with a trailer-mounted dish pointed at the sky. Within hours of Operation Epic Fury beginning she was handed a priority target package and told to...
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