History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the mid-1970s, two American planemakers built four extraordinary transport prototypes that could land almost anywhere and stop almost immediately. Both designs worked brilliantly. Both lost. And then one of them quietly went on to father one of the...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story The passengers on BOAC Flight 911 were promised a treat: a close-up view of Mount Fuji, gleaming under a brilliant blue sky. Minutes later, the sky that looked so calm tore their Boeing 707 apart. The disaster of 5 March 1966 is one of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Amid the Mirages, Skyhawks and Super Étendards of the 1982 Falklands War, the scrappiest Argentine aircraft of all was a stubby twin-turboprop that looked like it belonged in a different decade. The FMA IA 58 Pucará was slow, propeller-driven, and...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In June 1981, a young Israeli pilot flew the most exposed position in one of the most audacious air raids in history. Twenty-two years later, that same man carried a Torah scroll that had survived a concentration camp into orbit — and never came...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It was a routine training flight on a grey winter afternoon. Three American airmen took off from Wiesbaden in an unarmed little jet, expecting to be back in three hours. They never came home. The shootdown of a U.S. Air Force T-39 Sabreliner over East...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Sometimes the most valuable aircraft is the one that proves an idea wrong. The tiny Northrop X-4 Bantam is exactly that: a jet built to test a tempting theory about the sound barrier, which flew well enough to demonstrate, conclusively, that the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the last day of 1986, a sleek new fighter lifted off from a runway in Israel and climbed into a clear desert sky. It handled beautifully. It was, by many accounts, world-class. Eight months later, its own government voted to kill it — by a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It looked like a beer barrel with wings, and the Swedes said so themselves — they called it Flygande Tunnan, the “Flying Barrel.” But behind that comical shape hid a serious pioneer: the first swept-wing fighter to enter squadron...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Line the Tupolev Tu-128 up next to the bombers it was built to shoot down, and you might struggle to tell the hunter from the prey. At nearly 30 metres long and around 43 tonnes, this Soviet interceptor was bigger and heavier than many of the aircraft...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In 1997, the Russian government formally cancelled the fighter that was supposed to answer the American F-22. Three years later, in front of an invited crowd at Zhukovsky, that cancelled fighter took off anyway. The Mikoyan 1.44 is one of...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The men on the beach at Hammam al-Shatt heard the sea before they heard the sky. It was a clear Tuesday morning, just after ten, the first of October 1985, and the Tunisian coast south of Tunis was doing what it always did at that hour, fishermen, a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On the morning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the sirens came before the prayers were finished. It was 6 October 1973, and along the Suez Canal and across the Golan Heights, Egyptian and Syrian armies were pouring over...
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