Share this story The highest-scoring American ace of the Vietnam War never flew the aeroplane. On 9 September 1972, Captain Charles B. DeBellevue shot down his fifth and sixth MiGs from the back seat of an F-4D Phantom. He was a weapon systems officer. The stick and...
Share this story The Battle of Britain has a famous date, and it is 15 September. That is Battle of Britain Day, the climax, the one in the calendar.It is not the day that cost the most. That was Sunday 18 August 1940, when the Luftwaffe made an all-out attempt to...
Share this story At 07:38 on the morning of 18 April 1942, a 70-ton Japanese patrol boat called the Nittō Maru spotted an American task force about 650 nautical miles east of Japan and got a radio message off before the cruiser Nashville sank her.That message...
Share this story Look at the belly of the aircraft below. There is a cockpit on it. No glass, no pilot, no hole in the airframe. It is paint. A Royal Canadian Air Force CF-188 Hornet from below. The dark shape behind the radome is not a window. It is paint. Photo:...
Share this story On the night of 16 December 1943, Bomber Command came home to an England that had disappeared. Radiation fog had closed almost every airfield in the east. Crews who had survived Berlin circled above a white nothing until their tanks ran dry. At RAF...
Share this story On 6 September 1948, John Derry became the first Briton to fly faster than sound, in a de Havilland DH.108. Four years later to the day, on 6 September 1952, he was killed at Farnborough in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand people, along with his...
Share this story The most uncomfortable finding of the whole Ramstein investigation is also the simplest. Nobody broke a rule. The trinational safety commission concluded that the display complied with STANAG 3533, the NATO standard then governing flying displays, and...
Share this story The certified maximum capacity of a Boeing 747-200 in the densest airline layout ever offered was somewhere around 550 seats. On 24 May 1991, an El Al 747 freighter left Addis Ababa carrying, by the Guinness World Records figure, 1,088 people. Two of...
Share this story About six kilometres from McMurdo Station, under a shifting crust of snow on the Ross Ice Shelf, there is a Lockheed Super Constellation. It has been there since 8 October 1970. Nobody died in the accident that put it there, nobody ever came to take...
Share this story On 23 December 1942 a very large four-engined aeroplane with a glazed nose and twin fins lifted off from Augsburg. It had bunk beds in the fuselage and a galley with hot plates, because the flight it was designed for would take the best part of a day....
Share this story For two years, between 1956 and 1958, exactly one jet airliner was carrying fare-paying passengers anywhere in the world. The Comets were grounded. The 707 had not arrived. The Caravelle was not in service. The aircraft holding that title was a Soviet...
Share this story The Messerschmitt Me 321 Gigant could carry an 88 mm gun and its tractor, or a medium tank, or two hundred equipped soldiers. Its cargo hold was deliberately sized to match a German railway flatcar, so that anything which could travel by rail could be...
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