History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In June 1941 the United States rolled out a bomber so large that a B-17 could have parked under one of its wings. The Douglas XB-19 spanned 212 feet, carried sleeping bunks and a kitchen for its relief crew, and was, for a time, the largest aircraft...
Aviation World, History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story On a freezing April night in 1978, a South Korean airliner full of sleeping passengers wandered a thousand miles off course, over one of the most secret corners of the Soviet Union, and was hit by an air-to-air missile. What happened next is one of...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story On the afternoon of 1 November 2011, a Boeing 767 slid down a runway at Warsaw’s Chopin Airport on its belly, spraying sparks and foam, with 231 people aboard and not a single wheel beneath it. When it stopped, everyone walked away. Some...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story The story is irresistible: in the depths of the Second World War, a colossal six-engine German bomber slips across the Atlantic, flies to within sight of the Manhattan skyline, photographs Long Island, and turns for home before America ever knows it...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story It was, by common consent, one of the most beautiful fighters ever built, and one of the most complete. Bigger, faster and longer-legged than the Mirage 2000 it grew from, the Dassault Mirage 4000 was France’s bid to build a true heavyweight, a...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Long before the Tomahawk, and years before Polaris let a submarine fire a nuclear missile from beneath the waves, America’s first seagoing deterrent worked in the most nerve-wracking way imaginable. To shoot, the submarine had to surface in...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story Just after dawn on October 25, 1944, lookouts on a cluster of small American ships off the island of Samar saw something that should not have been there: pagoda masts on the horizon. The most powerful surface fleet Japan could still put to sea —...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twenty years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set foot on the summit of Mount Everest, two men in open-cockpit biplanes looked down on it from above. On April 3, 1933, a small British expedition did something that sounds impossible for the...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the last winter of World War II, Allied airmen flying night missions over Europe began to see something they could not explain. Glowing balls of light, orange and red, would appear beside their aircraft and pace them through the dark, matching...
Aviation World, History & Legends
Share this story Twenty-one years ago today, on August 14, 2005, a Boeing 737 crossed the sky over Greece with everyone aboard already beyond saving. It flew straight and level, obedient to its autopilot, holding its assigned altitude and following its route as if...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story For forty years, aviation enthusiasts have chased a ghost. It has a name, a rumored shape, and a trail of strange evidence. What it does not have is a single confirmed photograph, a serial number, or an admission that it was ever built. The ghost is...
History & Legends, Military Aviation
Share this story In the darkest years of the Cold War, American engineers designed a weapon so appalling that many of the people building it were relieved when it was cancelled. It was a cruise missile with an unshielded nuclear reactor for an engine, and it was meant...
Recent Comments