Share this story The de Havilland Comet was the world’s first jet airliner and, after three of them came apart in the air, the most notorious. Its reputation never recovered. But the last two unfinished Comet 4C fuselages on the Hawker Siddeley line did not go to...
Share this story In March 2026, Israel said it had destroyed Iran’s F-14 Tomcat fleet at Isfahan. Three months later Iranian state television showed a Tomcat coming home from a mission. Six months later, social media is still confidently announcing that the last...
Share this story In 1968, for two months, Eastern Air Lines flew fare-paying passengers between cities in the north-eastern United States in a French military transport with four propellers all driven by the same shaft. The following year American Airlines tried the...
Share this story The Royal Navy’s first jet fighter had a tail wheel. Two of them, in fact, tucked under the rear fuselage, so that the aircraft sat on the deck nose-high like a Spitfire. Every jet you can picture has a nosewheel, for the obvious reason that a...
Share this story In 1971 a Swiss fighter jet landed on a motorway. Not in an emergency — on purpose, as part of a doctrine that assumed Swiss airfields would be cratered within hours of a war starting, and that the air force would therefore have to operate from...
Share this story Britain came out of the Second World War with a captured German idea it did not fully understand. The delta wing promised high speed and a strong, light structure, and the Germans had been drawing them for years. Nobody in Britain knew what one...
Share this story At the 1981 Paris Air Show a small orange-and-white aircraft took off vertically like a helicopter, rotated its engines forward, flew past the crowd like an aeroplane, rotated them back, and stopped in mid-air to bow. The New York Times, not a...
Share this story In April 1980 a very ill old man was wheeled into a room at Northrop and shown a model of an aircraft. He had spent his career insisting that the ideal aeroplane was a wing and nothing else — no fuselage, no tail, no drag it did not need —...
Share this story Drag is the tax every aircraft pays for existing. On a transport aircraft in cruise, about half of that drag is nothing more than friction between the skin and the air. In the early 1960s Northrop and the United States Air Force went after that tax...
Share this story On the morning of 15 February 1961 a Sabena Boeing 707 came out of a clear sky over Belgium, circled Brussels airport three times while its crew fought it, and fell into a field at Berg, less than two miles short of the runway. Seventy-two people on...
Share this story Ninety-three young American soldiers, three South Vietnamese servicemen and eleven civilian crew boarded a Super Constellation at Travis Air Force Base in March 1962 and flew west. Somewhere between Guam and the Philippines, the aeroplane stopped...
Share this story On 10 March 1956 a six-engined American bomber descended through a solid deck of cloud over the Mediterranean to meet a tanker. It never arrived. No wreckage was found. No bodies were found. And neither were the two containers of nuclear weapon...
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