Share this story Put two engines in a fighter and you normally end up with something like a Bf 110: two nacelles, one on each wing, and an aeroplane that is bigger than the thing it is trying to shoot down. Kawasaki tried a different answer. They put one engine in...
Share this story Every helicopter pilot knows the problem with ejecting from a helicopter. Above your head, turning at several hundred revolutions per minute, are the blades. Fire yourself upwards and you go through them. Which is why, in more than a century of rotary...
Share this story On the night of 21 September 1993, a decorated Soviet combat pilot climbed onto the podium of the Russian parliament and, at twenty-five minutes past midnight, swore himself in as President of Russia. Five years earlier, the same man had been hanging...
Share this story The Cold War never became a war. That is the headline fact, and it is easy to mistake it for evidence that the danger was overstated. It was not. On at least four occasions between 1945 and 1989, the machinery that was supposed to prevent a third...
Share this story On 27 February 1974, a Soviet Antonov An-24 came down the approach into Gambell, Alaska, with one engine already dead from fuel starvation. It was not supposed to be there. It was supposed to be in Provideniya, 62 miles away across the Bering Sea in...
Share this story Leading Aircraftman Leonard Fuller was 22 years old, three months into flight training, and had just been landed on by another aeroplane. Not hit. Landed on. The Avro Anson underneath him had driven its gun turret into his port wing root and stuck...
Share this story Almost every maritime patrol aircraft in history has been something else first. The P-3 Orion was an airliner. The Nimrod was the Comet. The P-8 is a 737. You take a tube with wings and long legs, and you fill it with sonar equipment. The Breguet...
Share this story The Boeing CH-47 Chinook first flew on 21 September 1961. John F. Kennedy was president. The Berlin Wall was two months old. It is still in production. It is still in front-line service with the US Army, the RAF and a dozen other air forces. Germany...
Share this story Sweden gave Saab a requirement in the late 1940s that reads like a dare: build an aircraft that can strike anywhere along two thousand kilometres of coastline within one hour of leaving a central base, in any weather, at night, and operate from a...
Share this story In the autumn of 1982, eight Soviet bombers came down on the USS Enterprise and USS Midway in the North Pacific and locked their radars on both carriers from about 190 kilometres out. The US Navy’s response was deliberately restrained, because...
Share this story In 1967 the Soviet Union asked for an aeroplane that could carry forty tonnes five thousand kilometres in under six hours, land on an unprepared strip five hundred metres long, and do it in Siberian winter. Fifty-five years later, that aeroplane is...
Share this story In June 1967 France embargoed Israel and kept fifty Mirage 5 fighters that Israel had ordered and paid for. They sat in French hangars wearing Israeli serial numbers. Israel’s response took eight years and produced an aircraft the French would...
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