Share this story The comparison arrives within about ninety seconds of any conversation about defence budgets. Europe is rearming, China is building warships at a pace nobody can match, and somebody says it: this is how it felt before 1914. Sometimes they reach for...
Share this story In the summer of 1991, the Royal Air Force flew supersonic Tornados, was preparing for the Eurofighter, and had just watched stealth aircraft debut over Iraq. And the aircraft it relied on to spot incoming threats and guard the northern approaches to...
Share this story On a moonless night in 1942, an RAF bomber crossing the Dutch coast flew into a wall it could not see. There was no barrier in the sky — only an invisible grid of radar beams, searchlights and waiting fighters, each box of it engineered to catch one...
Share this story The F-104 Starfighter has one of the worst reputations in military aviation. Germany bought 916 of them, lost 292, and buried 116 pilots. The Luftwaffe called it the Witwenmacher — the Widowmaker.On one night in January 1982, that aircraft did...
Share this story In November 1983, a 31-year-old Quebec pilot landed a light aircraft by himself at a small airfield in Georgia. It was loaded with marijuana, flown up from Jamaica. Police were waiting.He was sentenced to five years and served sixteen months. He...
Share this story Count the engines on a Dornier Do 31 and you get to ten. Two of them are Pegasus turbofans, the same vectored-thrust engines that made the Harrier work. The other eight do nothing whatsoever in cruise. They sit in pods on the wingtips, four a side,...
Share this story On the morning of 12 May 1940, No. 12 Squadron was asked for volunteers. The target was a pair of bridges over the Albert Canal near Maastricht, across which the German Army was walking into Belgium. Everyone in the squadron volunteered.Five Fairey...
Share this story Ninety seconds before he put an Airbus A320 into a river, Chesley Sullenberger said something entirely ordinary. It was 3:26 in the afternoon on 15 January 2009, the aircraft was climbing away from LaGuardia, and he looked left out of the window....
Share this story The cargo compartment of a C-5A Galaxy is the size of a small warehouse. On the afternoon of 4 April 1975, the crew at Tan Son Nhut filled the lower deck of one with cardboard boxes, and into the boxes they put babies — two and three to a box,...
Share this story The radar worked. That was the strange part. It could see aircraft, track them, and hand the picture to the operators behind it. It simply could not do so reliably, or for long, or against the one category of target the entire programme existed to...
Share this story It was supposed to be a photograph. Five gleaming aircraft, all powered by the same company’s engines, tucked into tight formation over the California desert for a publicity shot. Twenty minutes later, two of them were falling out of the sky,...
Share this story The West called it “Concordski,” half in mockery. It flew two months before Concorde, looked almost identical, and carried the pride of the entire Soviet aerospace industry on its needle nose. On 3 June 1973, in front of a quarter of a...
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