History & Legends, Military Aviation
An extension to The Race for the Bomb, our focus series. The Enola Gay needed a runway, and the runway needed an island. This is the story of Tinian — the Pacific speck that became, for one astonishing year, the largest airport on Earth. Sunset, Tinian, midsummer...
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
Some aircraft are ugly and effective. A very few are beautiful and useless. The Republic XF-12 Rainbow was that rarest thing: an aeroplane so aerodynamically pure it looked sculpted — and so perfectly built for a mission that, by the time it flew, no longer...
Aviation World, History & Legends
In 1934, Americans looked up over Miami and saw something that made no sense: an aeroplane flying under what appeared to be a giant garden umbrella. It was not a stunt or a cartoon. It was the Nemeth Parasol, one of the strangest aircraft that ever actually left the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Look out of an airliner window at the swept wing and the engines slung beneath it in neat pods, and you are looking at an idea that was born on a bomber. The B-47 Stratojet never dropped a bomb in anger, yet it may be the most influential jet aircraft ever built. When...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
In the spring of 1942, young American pilots training in Florida had a grim joke about the sleek new bomber they were learning to fly: “one a day in Tampa Bay.” It was barely an exaggeration. The Martin B-26 Marauder was killing its own crews faster than...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
There is a sound no Western fighter pilot forgets: a deep, grinding drone that they can hear inside their own cockpit, over their own jet engines, as they slide into formation beside a giant silver bomber with four whirling pairs of propellers. It is the sound of the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Every time you settle into an airliner seat at 35,000 feet, sealed comfortably against air so thin and cold it would kill you in minutes, you are enjoying an idea that first flew on the last day of 1938. Its name was the Boeing 307 Stratoliner, and almost nobody...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
German fighter pilots had a name for the big four-engined British flying boat they kept meeting over the Atlantic: the Fliegendes Stachelschwein — the “flying porcupine.” They earned that respect the hard way. Attacking a lone Short Sunderland tended...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
At 7:26 on the morning of New Year’s Day 1929, a fat, three-engined Fokker lifted off from a field near Los Angeles and simply refused to come down. For the next six days, seven hours and forty minutes, it stayed in the air — sleeping, eating, refuelling...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
The photographs are almost hard to believe: Wellingtons limping home with whole sections of fuselage burned or shot away, the fabric skin hanging in ribbons and the aircraft’s metal skeleton showing through like the bones of a fish. And still they flew. That,...
Recent Comments