Share this story He had thirteen American kills, a colonel’s rank, and a name that made young U.S. pilots go quiet: Colonel Toon. He was North Vietnam’s deadliest ace, the ghost every Navy flier feared meeting over Haiphong. There was only one problem with...
Share this story Picture the Deutschlandhalle in Berlin in February 1938. The arena is packed. Down on the floor sits a contraption that looks like a light trainer that has lost its wings and grown two enormous three-blade fans on outrigger struts. A slight young...
Share this story It was the eve of the Obon holiday, when families across Japan travel home to honour their ancestors. Japan Airlines Flight 123 lifted off from Tokyo’s Haneda Airport at 18:12 on 12 August 1985, bound for Osaka. The aircraft was a Boeing 747SR,...
Share this story It was supposed to be an ordinary Tuesday. Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 lifted off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport on the morning of 17 April 2018, bound for Dallas with 149 people aboard. First Officer Darren Ellisor was flying the leg; in...
Share this story It was meant to be one of the shortest, dullest legs in the timetable. At 19:52 on 8 January 1989, British Midland Flight 92 climbed away from London Heathrow bound for Belfast, a Boeing 737-400 with 118 passengers and eight crew aboard. The aircraft...
Share this story On the morning of 27 March 1977, neither KLM Flight 4805 nor Pan Am Flight 1736 was meant to be anywhere near Tenerife. Both Boeing 747s were bound for Gran Canaria when a bomb planted by a separatist group tore through the terminal at Las Palmas....
Share this story There are aircraft one admires, and there are aircraft one falls a little in love with. The Latécoère 631 belongs firmly to the second category. Conceived in Toulouse, the spiritual home of French aviation, she was the last and grandest...
Share this story By 1943 the arithmetic over Germany had turned against the Luftwaffe. American daylight bomber streams — the tight, mutually-defending boxes of B-17s and B-24s — were arriving in numbers that piston fighters could not blunt fast enough....
Share this story Few aircraft have been asked to carry as much mythology on so little lift as the Sack AS-6. Search the phrase ‘Nazi flying saucer’ and this stubby, disc-winged machine appears again and again, presented as evidence that the Third Reich was...
Share this story Here is a fact that sounds invented: to bail out of the Douglas XB-42 Mixmaster, you first had to blow your own propellers off. The two blades spinning behind the tail would have shredded anyone who jumped, so Douglas wired the tailcone with...
Share this story In 1925, somewhere in the American countryside, Willard Ray Custer watched a windstorm peel the roof clean off a barn. Most people would have seen a repair bill. Custer saw physics. The roof had not moved forward — yet it rose. He reasoned that...
Share this story It was a little after ten on the night of 24 March 1944, and the pine woods of Lower Silesia were locked hard in frost. Some yards short of the tree line, the earth stirred, then opened. A head appeared, then a pair of shoulders in a made-over...
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