Share this story Ask an aviation enthusiast about Kampfgeschwader 200 and you will probably hear a version of the same story: that the Luftwaffe flew captured B-17 Flying Fortresses in American markings, slid them into USAAF bomber streams, and shot the formations...
Share this story Somewhere in the 1970s, on a January morning in New Delhi, an elephant flew down Rajpath. It was a HAL Chetak, the Indian licence-built version of the French Aérospatiale Alouette III, belonging to No. 116 Helicopter Unit of the Indian Air...
Share this story On the afternoon of Thursday 17 September 1992, an F-111E was coming home to RAF Upper Heyford in Oxfordshire after a routine training flight. In the cockpit sat Captain Jerry C. Lindh, the pilot, and Major David “Mike” McGuire, his weapon...
Share this story In February 1943 a German evaluation commission arrived at the Italian flight test centre at Guidonia with an Fw 190A-5 and a Bf 109G-4, and spent several weeks flying them against three new Italian fighters. The head of the commission, Oberst...
Share this story Khe Sanh Combat Base sat on a plateau in northwest Quảng Trị province, eleven kilometres from Laos, at the end of a road that had been cut by ambush since August 1967. Whatever the six thousand men there needed had to arrive by air. From 21 January...
Share this story The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was the best German fighter of 1941, and by 1944 it had a problem that no amount of courage could fix. Above roughly six thousand metres it ran out of air. The BMW 801 radial had a single-stage supercharger, and at the altitudes...
Share this story In August 1941 a civil servant named David Bensusan-Butt was given 633 night photographs taken by RAF bombers over occupied Europe and asked a simple question: are they hitting anything? His answer broke Bomber Command. Of the aircraft whose crews...
Share this story There is a category of military aircraft that never fires a shot and decides the battle anyway. The Beriev A-50 is one of them: an Ilyushin Il-76 transport with a nine-metre radar dish bolted on top, fifteen people inside, and the ability to see six...
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...
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