Share this story On 5 December 1941, Squadron Leader A. E. Hill flew a photo-reconnaissance Spitfire along the Normandy coast at very low level and took a photograph of a clifftop near a village called Bruneval. In it, next to a villa, sits a large white dish. British...
Share this story In 1982, forty years after the last one made sense, a Soviet design bureau flew a jet attack aircraft with a rear gunner. Not a token installation. A proper remotely-controlled tail turret with a twin-barrelled 23 mm cannon, aimed by a second crewman...
Share this story Every airborne early warning aircraft in the world looks broadly the same: a transport or an airliner with an enormous rotating dish balanced on struts above the fuselage. The Hawkeye does it. The Sentry does it. Even GlobalEye, which uses a fixed...
Share this story In January 1943, Allied aircraft in New Guinea flew 416 sorties against a single Japanese convoy and sank two ships. Six weeks later, over three days in the Bismarck Sea, the same air force attacked another convoy and sank all eight transports and...
Share this story At 00:16 on 6 June 1944, a wooden glider carrying twenty-eight men hit the ground at over ninety miles an hour, tore through barbed wire, and stopped about fifty yards from a bridge over the Caen Canal. It had been cast off from a bomber at 7,000 feet...
Share this story Gander sits in the middle of Newfoundland, in spruce and bog, a long way from anywhere. In 2001 fewer than ten thousand people lived there. Its airport had four runways built for a different era, when piston airliners needed to stop for fuel before...
Share this story The photograph looks like an accident in progress. Two columns of black smoke stand on the runway at Barksdale Air Force Base, thick enough to swallow an eight-engined bomber whole, and out of the murk a third B-52 Stratofortress is coming, wings...
Share this story On 20 May 2023, in a hotel ballroom in Reno, a 75-year-old man finished telling a story he had told several hundred times, stepped away from the lectern, and collapsed. There were doctors in the audience. He died at the hospital that night. Brian Shul...
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...
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