Share this story The bomb was supposed to fall away into the sky. Instead it came back up the chute and hit Staff Sergeant Henry Erwin in the face, burning at around 1,300°F (about 700°C). Within seconds he was blind, his clothes were on fire, and thick white...
Share this story On the night of 3 January 2026, the first helicopter into one of the most sensitive raids in recent American history was an Army MH-47 Chinook flown by Chief Warrant Officer 5 Eric Slover. Minutes later he had four bullets in his leg. Seven weeks...
Share this story Some aces are remembered for their kills. Hubert Zemke is remembered for his pilots. As commander of the US Eighth Air Force’s 56th Fighter Group, he turned a unit of eager young P-47 Thunderbolt pilots into Zemke’s Wolf Pack, one of the...
Share this story At a quarter past three on the afternoon of 14 October 1973, Egyptian radar operators in the Nile Delta watched a formation of Israeli jets sweep in from the Mediterranean near Port Said. Over the next 53 minutes, the sky above the Delta filled with...
Share this story It has no fuselage, no fin and no tailplane, and it looks like something from the 1980s rather than 1945. The Horten Ho 229 is one of the most photographed German aircraft of the Second World War, and it is usually described as the world’s first...
Share this story At 10:12 on the morning of 28 December 1944, a Japanese A6M Zero dived through anti-aircraft fire and crashed into the Liberty ship SS John Burke in the Mindanao Sea. For a few seconds there was only smoke. Then her cargo of ammunition went up, and...
Share this story At 9:14 on the morning of 12 November 2001, American Airlines Flight 587 lifted off from New York’s John F. Kennedy airport bound for Santo Domingo. Many of the 251 passengers were Dominican New Yorkers going home. About 105 seconds later the...
Share this story At 15:45 on Tuesday, 2 October 2001, Swissair chairman and CEO Mario Corti stood in front of the cameras and announced that the airline would stop flying. By then, jets carrying the Swiss cross were already sitting on aprons from Zurich to New York,...
Share this story Ninety-seven years ago this week, on the afternoon of 30 September 1929, a German car heir strapped himself into a pod under a glider wing, alongside sixteen gunpowder rockets, lit them and shot into the sky over Frankfurt. Fritz von Opel stayed up...
Share this story On 28 January 1925, a young Turkish pilot climbed into a small biplane he had designed and built himself, took off, flew for fifteen minutes and landed. It was the first flight ever made by an aircraft built in Turkey. Later that same day, he learned...
Share this story Somewhere over the Libyan desert on the morning of 15 April 1986, the reconnaissance officer in the back seat of an SR-71 called out a warning to his pilot. Walter Watson was seeing missile launch signals on his defensive panel. Up front, Major Brian...
Share this story Business jets are built to be quiet, smooth and economical. So a photograph of a Dassault Falcon 20 with a long cone of flame blasting out of one engine looks like a joke or a Photoshop. It is neither. In the late 1980s one Falcon 20, registered...
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