Share this story In the early 1950s the United States, home of Boeing and Douglas and the world’s mightiest aircraft industry, went shopping abroad for a bomber. It bought a British one. The Martin B-57 Canberra — an American-built version of the English...
Share this story On 7 April 2003, Captain Kim Campbell rolled in over Baghdad to help American soldiers pinned down near the Tigris. She put her A-10 Thunderbolt where it was needed, took the shot, and started to pull off target. Then a surface-to-air missile found...
Share this story Most warplanes of the 1950s are museum pieces or scrap. The Xian H-6 is neither. Nearly seventy years after its Soviet ancestor first flew, China is still building, flying, and continually re-arming this jet — and the latest versions are among...
Share this story She was the best-known aviator in Nazi Germany, and one of the most gifted test pilots of her era — a small, intense woman who flew rocket planes, the first practical helicopter, and a piloted version of the V-1 flying bomb. She was also a...
Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force wanted a single machine that could climb fast, find a Soviet bomber on its own radar, and kill it with a bay full of missiles before it reached an American city. The answer was the F-102 Delta Dagger — the...
Share this story In 1949 the Swedish Air Force asked for something that did not exist anywhere in the world: an interceptor capable of Mach 1.4 to 1.5, able to operate from dispersed road bases, to meet a Soviet bomber threat crossing the Baltic.Saab’s answer...
Share this story There is an aeroplane in the Cold War Gallery at Dayton that the museum has deliberately not restored. Its wings are off. Its nose is crushed. The paint is scorched.The Lockheed XF-90 lost its competition, never entered production, and was officially...
Share this story In February 1938, inside a Berlin exhibition hall, a 25-year-old woman hovered a helicopter between the walls.Nobody had flown a helicopter indoors before. The Focke-Achgelis Fa 61 was the first genuinely controllable helicopter in the world, and...
Share this story Every helicopter engineer has the same dream: a machine that lifts straight up off a rooftop like a helicopter, then flies as fast as an aeroplane. The trouble is the rotor. It gives you vertical flight, but it also limits your speed — so what...
Share this story Picture a small jet taking off with a perfectly ordinary straight wing. Then, in the air, the whole wing slowly pivots — not sweeping symmetrically back on both sides like a fighter, but rotating flat around its centre, until one tip points...
Share this story When Burt Rutan rolled his latest creation out at Oshkosh in 1996, the reaction from a crowd that worshipped him was more or less: what went wrong? The Boomerang looked broken. There was a small engine boom stuck to the left of the fuselage. The right...
Share this story Imagine a fighter aircraft with four machine guns — and not one of them able to fire straight ahead. That was the Blackburn Roc. Its guns lived in a powered turret behind the pilot, so to shoot down an enemy the Roc had to fly alongside it, not...
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