Share this story On 19 February 1928, a 20-year-old German woman climbed into the cockpit of a Junkers F.13 named Kiek in die Welt — Berlin dialect for “look in the world” — and flew it for Lufthansa. She is generally credited as the first...
Share this story On the morning of 20 April 1933, in the Tanezrouft, Bill Lancaster took out a fuel card and wrote what he knew would be his last message. He had been down in the Sahara for eight days. He had no water left. Exactly one year earlier, to the day, a man...
Share this story Every delta-winged aircraft America built in the 1950s and 1960s owes something to one prototype that only one pilot ever had a good word for, and he did not really. The Convair XF-92A flew 118 times over five years, was rebuilt around three different...
Share this story Nine B-29s took off from Kadena on Okinawa on the morning of 23 October 1951. Their target was Namsi, a North Korean airfield still under construction, sitting about thirty miles from Antung — where roughly a hundred MiG-15s were based on the...
Share this story The Catalina affair is named after the wrong aeroplane. The Catalina survived. Its seven-man crew were fished out of the Baltic by a West German freighter and went home. The aircraft that mattered was a Douglas DC-3 called Hugin, and it went into the...
Share this story At 23:34:49 on the night of 1 July 2002, the collision avoidance system aboard a Tupolev Tu-154M over southern Germany told its crew to climb. Seconds later the air traffic controller told them to descend. They descended. On the Boeing 757 converging...
Share this story In April 1944 a Japanese submarine left Lorient carrying the plans for the most advanced interceptor in the world. It reached Singapore on 14 July. Twelve days later, on its way home, USS Sawfish sank it off the Philippines. A second boat carrying the...
Share this story In 1954 the Air Ministry wrote a requirement that no aircraft on earth could meet. OR.330 asked for a machine that would cruise at Mach 2.5 at 60,000 feet, be capable of Mach 3, fly 5,754 miles, and penetrate Soviet airspace and come home. Avro won...
Share this story By the summer of 1958 the experimental shop at Hawker’s Kingston works held something very close to a complete aeroplane. The wing was built. The fuselage frames were joined. The undercarriage had been tested, the systems rigged, the wind-tunnel...
Share this story Thomas McGuire wrote the rule himself. Never take a P-38 into a turning fight at low altitude. He put it in a manual the Fifth Air Force distributed to its pilots. On 7 January 1945, at three hundred feet over Negros Island, he broke it deliberately,...
Share this story At about twenty to two on the morning of 28 November 1979, someone in Air New Zealand’s navigation section changed two numbers in a computer. The McMurdo waypoint stored in the ground system moved roughly two degrees and fifteen minutes of...
Share this story Britain had been at war for three days. At quarter past six on the morning of 6 September 1939, a radar station on the Essex coast reported unidentified aircraft approaching at high altitude over West Mersea. There were no German aircraft. The plots...
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